Classic Fiction, Poetry, & Plays – Black History Month 2020

Dear Justyce

Nic Stone

Incarcerated teen Quan Banks writes letters to Justyce McCallister, with whom he bonded years before over family issues, about his experiences in the American juvenile justice system.

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Parable of the Sower

Octavia E. Butler

The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old black woman with the hereditary train of "hyperempathy"--which causes her to feel others' pain as her own--sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown.

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Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

Okonkwo, a great man in Igbo traditional society, cannot adapt to the profound changes brought by the British conquest of Nigeria. Yet, as in classic tragedy, Okonkwo's character as well as external forces contribute to his downfall.

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Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison

With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.

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Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston

Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong Black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.

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