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A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde
  • Author(s): Tia Williams
  • Location(s): Harlem
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): Contemporary

One florist. One pianist. One love story . . . One hundred years in the making. Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn’t one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty,...

Another Country

Another Country
  • Author(s): James Baldwin
  • Location(s): Harlem, New York City (NYC)
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): early 1970s

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions–sexual, racial, political, artistic–that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their...

Crook Manifesto

Crook Manifesto
  • Author(s): Colson Whitehead
  • Location(s): Harlem, New York City (NYC)
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): 1970s

1971 – Trash is piled on the streets, crime is at a record high, and the city is careening towards bankruptcy. A shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Ray Carney, furniture-store owner...

Go Tell it on the Mountain

Go Tell it on the Mountain
  • Author(s): James Baldwin
  • Location(s): Harlem
  • Genre(s): Historical, Fiction
  • Era(s): 1930s

‘I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal with my father.’ Drawing on James Baldwin’s own boyhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, his first novel tells the story of young Johnny Grimes....

Harlem After Midnight

Harlem After Midnight
  • Author(s): Louise Hare
  • Location(s): Harlem
  • Genre(s): Crime, Historical, Mystery
  • Era(s): 1930s

1936, September 17th, 1am… In the middle of Harlem, in the dead of night, a woman falls from a second storey window. In her hand, she holds a passport and the name written on it is Lena Aldridge… Nine...

Harlem Shuffle

Harlem Shuffle
  • Author(s): Colson Whitehead
  • Location(s): Harlem
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): early 1960s

To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably-priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on...

Jazz Moon

Jazz Moon
  • Author(s): Joe Okonkwo
  • Location(s): Harlem, Paris
  • Genre(s): Fiction, Historical
  • Era(s): 1920s

In a lyrical, captivating debut set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance and glittering Jazz Age Paris, Joe Okonkwo creates an evocative story of emotional and artistic awakening. On a sweltering summer night in 1925, beauties in beaded...

Stories From the Tenants Downstairs

Stories From the Tenants Downstairs
  • Author(s): Sidik Fofana
  • Location(s): Harlem
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): Contemporary

Banneker Terrace on 129th and Fred Doug ain’t pretty, but it’s home. Home to young and old, folk just trying to get by. Cookouts with beer and wings, summertime with souped-up cars bumpin music. People don’t come here for...

The Book Itch

The Book Itch
  • Author(s): Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
  • Location(s): Harlem
  • Genre(s): Children
  • Era(s): 20th Century

In the 1930s, Lewis’s dad, Lewis Michaux Sr., had an itch he needed to scratch a book itch. How to scratch it? He started a bookstore in Harlem and named it the National Memorial African Bookstore. And as far...

The House of Impossible Beauties

The House of Impossible Beauties
  • Author(s): Joseph Cassara
  • Location(s): Harlem
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): 1980s

A gritty and gorgeous debut inspired by the real House of Xtravaganza made famous by the seminal documentary Paris Is Burning It’s 1980 in New York City, and nowhere is the city’s glamour and energy better reflected than in the...

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