Gabriel Green's first chapbook The Magical Negro Reveals His Secret is, among other things, a long quest towards complete selfhood.

A National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award Winner! From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood. "Morgan Parker's latest collection is a riveting testimony to everyday blackness . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read—both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest." —TIME Magazine A Best Book of 2019 at TIME, Elle, BuzzFeed, the Star Tribune, AVClub, and more. A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Vogue, O: the Oprah Magazine, NYLON, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, and more. Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics—of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present—timeless black melancholies and triumphs.

This book explores the supernatural and prophetic elements within Shakespeare's ten plays of English history: King John, Richard II, Henry IV (Parts One and Two), Henry V, Henry VI (Parts One, Two and Three), Richard III, and Henry VIII. Treating each as a form of nonfiction, it analyzes these plays and their prophecies through the lens of free will or fate, demonstrating how Shakespeare's characters are entangled with cosmic forces and the occult. The author makes several intriguing discoveries regarding Shakespeare's plays, beliefs, and the world he lived in.

Like all great adventures, this one starts with someone trying to get a girl. After all, King Meneleaus didn't go to Troy for the baklava. Playwright, journalist, comedian and bestselling author Mark Leiren-Young recalls his teenage escapades in this hilarious memoir and coming-of-age story. A geeky bully-magnet, Mark was seventeen and wanted to be a playwright, but even more than that, he wanted to impress Sarah, the girl he’d pined for since elementary school. It’s 1980 and, thanks to Doug Henning, magic is hip, so Mark hooks up with Randy, a stoner magician, and Kyle, an ambitious young actor, to chase fame—and the women of their dreams. Seeing a chance at having all of their desires come true, they risk everything to create a show they know will be like Star Wars on stage. But is getting a date worth having your head cut off?

Krin Gabbard explores the often hidden & unacknowledged contribution of African American culture to Hollywood movies. Although relying heavily on African American music, language & street culture, the old racial hierarchies often seem preserved.

"A gorgeous and thrilling paean to the ferocious power of women. The characters live, bleed, and roar. "―Laini Taylor, New York Times bestselling author A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Fantasy Novel • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR Books • Barnes and Noble • BookPage In the late 1800s, three sisters use witchcraft to change the course of history in this powerful novel of magic, family, and the suffragette movement. In 1893, there's no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box. But when the Eastwood sisters―James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna―join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women's movement into the witch's movement. Stalked by shadows and sickness, hunted by forces who will not suffer a witch to vote―and perhaps not even to live―the sisters will need to delve into the oldest magics, draw new alliances, and heal the bond between them if they want to survive. There's no such thing as witches. But there will be. An homage to the indomitable power and persistence of women, The Once and Future Witches reimagines stories of revolution, motherhood, and women's suffrage—the lost ways are calling. Praise for The Once and Future Witches: "A glorious escape into a world where witchcraft has dwindled to a memory of women's magic, and three wild, sundered sisters hold the key to bring it back...A tale that will sweep you away."―Yangsze Choo, New York Times bestselling author "This book is an amazing bit of spellcraft and resistance so needed in our times, and a reminder that secret words and ways can never be truly and properly lost, as long as there are tongues to speak them and ears to listen."―P. Djèlí Clark, author The Black God's Drum For more from Alix E. Harrow, check out The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

Working for a prominent member of the NAACP in 1946 when a request comes from her favorite childhood author to investigate the murder of a black war hero, Regina Robichard travels to Mississippi, where she navigates the muddy waters of racism, relationships, and her own tragic past.

"A professional performer presents tricks for magicians at every level of skill, especially novices. Intended for performances in bars, restaurants, and other close-up venues, these 29 routines include original tricks as well as tried-and-true crowd pleasers. Over 300 photographs illustrate clear instructions for illusions involving cards, money, fire, mind reading, and comedy"--

Explores the bonds of family, neighbors, lovers, and friends as they are tested in new environments. "I feel like I can't tell one story about a giant mustard penis because it's not about a mustard penis only, but about all of these incidents together, in context, and through time." So begins the title story in Renee Simms's debut short story collection, Meet Behind Mars—a revealing look at how geography, memory, ancestry, and desire influence our personal relationships. In many of her stories, Simms exposes her own interest in issues concerning time and space. For example, in "Rebel Airplanes," an L.A. engineer works by day on city sewers and by night on R-C planes that she yearns to launch into the cosmos. The character-driven stories in Meet Behind Mars offer beautiful insight into the emotional lives of caretakers, auto workers, dancers, and pawn shop employees. In "High Country," a frustrated would-be novelist considers ditching her family in the middle of the desert. In "Dive," an adoptee returns to her adoptive home, still haunted by histories she does not know. Simms writes from the voice of women and girls who struggle under structural oppression and draws from the storytelling tradition best represented by writers like Edward P. Jones, whose characters have experiences that are specific to black Americans living in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One instance of this is in "The Art of Heroine Worship," in which black families integrate into a white suburb of Detroit in the 1970s. The stories in this collection span forty years and two continents and range in structure from epistolary to traditionally structured realism, with touches of absurdity, humor, and magic. Meet Behind Mars will appeal to readers interested in contemporary literary fiction.

First published in 2005. Written by eminent Egyptologist, E.A. Wallis Budge, this work addresses Egyptian religion and mythology in all of its manifestations, from times when earth, sea air and shy were filled with hostile spirits and men lived in terror of the Evil Eye, to the moment when Egyptians hailed Amen-Ra as their one god. Topics include the predynastic cults, magic, gods (cosmic, stellar, borrowed and foreign), Memphite theology, judgement of the dead, and the underworld. Important hymns and legends, in English translation are included.