Explores contemporary metafictions by writers of color and Indigenous writers and how they engage visibility, privacy, and access.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the second-most assigned American novel since 1945 and is one of the most enduring. It is studied by many thousands of high school and college students every year and has been since the 1950s. His landmark essays, with their blend of personal history and cultural theory, have been extraordinarily influential. Ralph Ellison in Context includes authoritative chapters summing up longstanding conversations, while offering groundbreaking essays on a variety of topics not yet covered in the copious critical and biographical literature. It provides fresh perspectives on some of the most important people and places in Ellison's life, and explores where his work and biography cross paths with some of the pressing topics of his time. It includes chapters on Ellison's literary influences and offers a definitive overview of his early writings. It also provides an overview of Ellison's reception and reputation from his death in 1994 through 2020.

The Politics of Privacy in Contemporary Native, Latinx, and Asian American Metafictions is the first book-length study to approach contemporary issues of racialized visibility and privacy through narrative form. Using a formal maneuver, narrative privacy, Colleen G. Eils analyzes how writers of contemporary metafictions explicitly withhold stories from readers to illuminate and theorize the politics of privacy in a post-9/11 US context. As a formal device and reading strategy, narrative privacy has two primary critical interests: affirming the historically political nature of visibility, particularly for people of color and indigenous people, and theorizing privacy as a political assertion of power over representation and material vulnerability. Eils breaks strict disciplinary silos by putting visibility/surveillance studies, ethnic studies, and narrative studies in conversation with one another. Eils also puts texts in the Native, Latinx, and Asian American literary canon in conversation with each other. She focuses on texts by Viet Thanh Nguyen, David Treuer, Monique Truong, Rigoberto González, Nam Le, and Stephen Graham Jones that call into question our positions as readers and critics. In deliberately and self-consciously evading readers through the form of their fiction, these writers seize privacy as a political tool for claiming and wielding power in both representational and material registers.

Provides a comprehensive account of the structural and linguistic distinctiveness of stories told in the first-person plural, describing its features and rhetorical effects.

Deploys martial arts as a lens to analyze performance, power, and identity within the evolving fusion of Black and Asian American cultures in history and media.

Winner of: The Pulitzer Prize The National Book Critics Circle Award The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more... Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

The first in a wonderfully imaginative series about two girls that is marked by revealing and lyrical small details.

A message of love, support, and empowerment, from bestselling author Julie Fogliano and Christian Robinson, Caldecott Honoree and creator of the New York Times Bestseller You Matter. just in case you want to fly here's some wind and here's the sky Funny and sweet, told with lyrical text and bright, unexpected illustrations, Just in Case You Want to Fly is a celebration of heading off on new adventures--and of knowing your loved ones will always have your back when you need them. A joyful, inclusive cast of children fly, sing, and wish their way across the pages, with everything they could ever need--a cherry if you need a snack, and if you get itchy here's a scratch on the back--to explore the world around them. Bold illustrations created by Christian Robinson, creator of You Matter, bring out the humor and warmth of the poetic text, teasing out new meanings and adding delightful details that will have you turning the pages again and again. Julie Fogliano and Christian Robinson, the creators of the award-winning When's My Birthday?, have teamed up again to create a perfect book to share with the little ones you love--to give them everything they need to go out into the world, and reassure them you'll always be waiting to welcome them home. Whether it's for big milestones like graduations or holidays, or quiet bedtimes and cozy moments together, Just In Case You Want to Fly is made for sharing, with gentle humor and sweet reassurances. A Bank Street Best Book of the Year - Outstanding Merit

“. . . features two young Korean American siblings who take a trip through a magical portal into a land filled with characters from old Korean fables. . . Kim is making a statement about the loss of culture among children of immigrants while also writing a book that returns some of that to them.” —Jay Caspian King, The New York Times Beautifully illustrated and told by debut author Julie Kim, this authentic voices picture book in graphic-novel style follows a young Korean girl and boy whose search for their missing grandmother leads them into a world inspired by Korean folklore, complete with mischievous goblins (dokkebi), a greedy tiger, a clever rabbit, and a wily fox. Two young children pay a visit to Halmoni (grandmother in Korean), only to discover she's not home. As they search for her, noticing animal tracks covering the floor, they discover a window, slightly ajar, new to their grandmother's home. Their curiosity gets the best of them, and they crawl through and discover an unfamiliar fantastical world, and their adventure begins. As they continue to search for their grandmother and solve the mystery of the tracks, they go deeper into a world of Korean folklore, meeting a number of characters who speak in Korean along the way, and learn more about their cultural heritage. This beautifully illustrated graphic picture book is filled with a number of Easter eggs for readers of all ages to discover, and is inspired by the Korean folktales that author and illustrator Julie Kim heard while growing up. Translations to Korean text in the story and more about the folktale-inspired characters are included at the end.

With the same unique vision that brought his now classic Mars trilogy to vivid life, bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson boldly imagines an alternate history of the last seven hundred years. In his grandest work yet, the acclaimed storyteller constructs a world vastly different from the one we know. . . . “A thoughtful, magisterial alternate history from one of science fiction’s most important writers.”—The New York Times Book Review It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur—the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed. But what if the plague had killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been—one that stretches across centuries, sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, and spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation. Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars, Robinson navigates a world where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions, while Christianity is merely a historical footnote. Probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power—and even love—in this bold New World. “Exceptional and engrossing.”—New York Post “Ambitious . . . ingenious.”—Newsday