An extraordinary work of fiction, from one of the world's most exceptional writers. A journalist visits an elderly painter and becomes intrigued by his young female companions. Four years' worth of book research is set on fire in front of a writer. A successful MP disappears without a trace. Written with stylistic innovation, this sequence of novellas exploring the nature of art echoes the themes and preoccupations of Fowles' earlier work and cements his position as a master storyteller. 'Pick up any of these stories and you won't, as they say, be able to put it down' Financial Times

What constitutes black studies and where does this discipline stand at the end of the twentieth century? In this wide-ranging and original volume, Manning Marable--one of the leading scholars of African American history--gathers key materials from contemporary thinkers who interrogate the richly diverse content and multiple meanings of the collective experiences of black folk. Here are numerous voices expressing very different political, cultural, and historical views, from black conservatives, to black separatists, to blacks who advocate radical democratic transformation. Here are topics ranging from race and revolution in Cuba, to the crack epidemic in Harlem, to Afrocentrism and its critics. All of these voices, however, are engaged in some aspect of what Marable sees as the essential triad of the black intellectual tradition: describing the reality of black life and experiences, critiquing racism and stereotypes, or proposing positive steps for the empowerment of black people. Highlights from Dispatches from the Ebony Tower - Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Manning Marable debate the role of activism in black studies. - John Hope Franklin reflects on his role as chair of the President's race initiative. - Cornel West discusses topics that range from the future of the NAACP through the controversies surrounding Louis Farrakhan and black nationalism to the very question of what "race" means. - Amiri Baraka lays out strategies for a radical new curriculum in our schools and universities. - Marable's introduction provides a thorough overview of the history and current state of black studies in America.

This is a profoundly moving story of Black colleges in Mississippi during a watershed moment in their history. It is also the story of young Americans trying to balance their pursuit of higher education with the parallel struggle for civil rights. Radicalizing the Ebony Tower examines colleges against the backdrop of the black freedom struggle of the middle twentieth century, a highly contentious conflict between state agents determined to protect the racial hierarchy and activists equally determined to cripple white supremacy. Activists demanded that colleges play a central role in the Civil Rights Movement (a distinct challenge to the notion of the ivory tower) while state agents demanded that colleges distance themselves from the black freedom struggle and promised to mete out harsh penalties if they did not. Through the words and deeds of actual participants, this path-breaking study documents how activists ultimately transformed non-political institutions into libratory agents.

A leading African-American historian of race in America exposes the uncomfortable truths about race, slavery and the American academy, revealing that our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained it.

For an African American scholar, who may be the lone minority in a department, navigating the tenure minefield can be a particularly harrowing process. Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy go beyond standard professional resources to serve up practical advice for black faculty intent on playing?and winning?the tenure game.Addressing head-on how power and the thorny politics of race converge in the academy, The Black Academic?s Guide is full of invaluable tips and hard-earned wisdom. It is an essential handbook that will help black faculty survive and thrive in academia without losing their voices, or their integrity.

Across America, universities have become big businesses—and our cities their company towns. But there is a cost to those who live in their shadow. Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target the Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes readers from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through eye-opening conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students’ needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, scholar Davarian L. Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power—and who is made vulnerable. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be. But as Baldwin shows, there is an alternative vision for urban life, one that necessitates a more equitable relationship between our cities and our universities.