High Cotton is an extraordinarily rich account of the dreams and inner turmoils of a new generation of the black upper middle class, capturing the essence of a part of American society that has mostly been ignored in literature. The novel's protagonist journeys from his childhood home in the midwest to college, a stint in New York publishing, and Europe, yet the issue of his "blackness" remains at the heart of his being.

Twenty-one horror, crime, and alternative history stories.

Second book in the Neely Kate Mystery series, a companion series to Rose Gardner Investigations. Neely Kate’s life is finally coming together. She’s living and working with her best friend, Rose. Her newly discovered brother, Joe, has decided he’s done hiding that she’s his sister, and her new boyfriend, Jed, is everything she could have dreamed of and more. Only things aren’t going as well as she’d hoped. Neely Kate is still keeping secrets from Rose. Joe wants to introduce her as his sister at a high society dinner even though she doesn’t know the difference between a soup and a dessert spoon. And Jed is spending more and more time away from her and won’t tell he what he’s up to. She’s worried he’s changed his mind about them, not that she’s surprised—can you build a relationship on digging up a body together? Now someone’s calling Neely Kate about her Ardmore secrets, and her sister Kate might be locked up on a psych ward, but she has a few surprises of her own. Neely Kate can’t help wondering if it’s time to come clean about her past with the people she loves. The dead body that turns up in her basement might be the kick in the pants she needs. Because the truth will set you free, or if you’re Neely Kate, land you in hot water. Series order: Rose Gardner Investigations Series Family Jewels For the Birds Hell in a Handbasket Up Shute Creek (Fall 2018) Neely Kate Mystery Series Trailer Trash In High Cotton (July 31, 2018)

Cultured, attractive, and strong-willed, Shelby Collins is mature for a sixteen-year-old. Her family lives in Cartersville, Georgia. Her mother has taken a trip to Alabama to tend Shelbys ailing grandmother. Shelby has been left at home to care for her younger brother and sister and to see to the needs of her father. One night her father, who has come home drunk, tries to molest her. Frightened, she fights him off and flees, but it isnt long before her angry father tracks her down and places her in a reform school in distant Birmingham.While Shelby is able to make a new life for herself in Birmingham, she suffers greatly. But, through her many difficulties, she learns that blessings can come in unexpected ways.This poignant and heart-warming novel addresses several fundamental human longings. Is there an overshadowing influence for good that can help direct our lives? Can we learn to trust again after weve been betrayed? Is there a power that can come into our hearts to help us forgive?

Despite the increased variety of manufactured fibres available to the textile industry, demand for cotton remains high because of its suitability on the basis of price, quality and comfort across a wide range of textile products. Cotton producing nations are also embracing sustainable production practices to meet growing consumer demand for sustainable resource production. This important book provides a comprehensive analysis of the key scientific and technological advances that ensure the quality of cotton is maintained from the field to fabric.The first part of the book discusses the fundamental chemical and physical structure of cotton and its various properties. Advice is offered on measuring and ensuring the quality of cotton fibre. Building on these basics, Part two analyses various means for producing cotton such as genetic modification and organic production. Chapters focus on spinning, knitting and weaving technologies as well as techniques in dyeing. The final section of the book concludes with chapters concerned with practical aspects within the industry such as health and safety issues and recycling methods for used cotton.Written by an array of international experts within the field, Cotton: science and technology is an essential reference for all those concerned with the manufacture and quality control of cotton. - Summarises key scientific and technological issues in ensuring cotton quality - Discusses the fundamental chemical and physical structure of cotton - Individual chapters focus on spinning, knitting and weaving technologies

Southern women may look as delicate as flowers, but there's iron in their veins.

The New York Times best selling true story of an unlikely friendship forged between a woman and the man she incorrectly identified as her rapist and sent to prison for 11 years. Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. She was able to escape, and eventually positively identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken-- but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After eleven years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released, after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed. Two years later, Jennifer and Ronald met face to face-- and forged an unlikely friendship that changed both of their lives. With Picking Cotton, Jennifer and Ronald tell in their own words the harrowing details of their tragedy, and challenge our ideas of memory and judgment while demonstrating the profound nature of human grace and the healing power of forgiveness.

An intoxicating, provocative novel of appetite, identity, and self-construction, Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland tells the story of an outsider, trapped between a painful past and a tenebrous future, in Europe's brightest and darkest city. Jed—young, gay, black, out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicago—flees to the city of his fantasies, a museum of modernism and decadence: Berlin. The paradise that tyranny created, the subsidized city isolated behind the Berlin Wall, is where he's chosen to become the figure that he so admires, the black American expatriate. Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and Auden, Jed arrives to chase boys and to escape from what it means to be a black male in America. But history, both personal and political, can't be avoided with time or distance. Whether it's the judgment of the cousin he grew up with and her husband's bourgeois German family, the lure of white wine in a down-and-out bar, a gang of racists looking for a brawl, or the ravaged visage of Rock Hudson flashing behind the face of every white boy he desperately longs for, the past never stays past even in faraway Berlin. In the age of Reagan and AIDS in a city on the verge of tearing down its walls, he clambers toward some semblance of adulthood amid the outcasts and expats, intellectuals and artists, queers and misfits. And, on occasion, the city keeps its Isherwood promises and the boy he kisses, incredibly, kisses him back.