American Renaissance

Deceived into leaving Haiti and Cuba by Mr. and Mrs. Vega, Billie and Carmine are confronted with a harsh reality once on American soil. The teens realize they are sex workers for the Pricey Pussy Empire, and the couple who lured them to the US actually run their own division for the underground flesh-for-sale operation. Billie and Carmine will suffer through human indecency, cruel punishment, and sexual assault in hopes of breaking the chains of captivity. There is an expensive price tag attached to vengeance, and once it is theirs, they may just end up paying with their souls.

With the warm embrace of New Orleans behind her, Mimi Daquin, a young, fair-skinned African American woman, moves to Atlanta with her father and stepmother. There, for the first time, Mimi is awakened both to the reality of racism in America and the relative privilege that her fair skin affords her. Amid segregation, racial tension, and escalating violence, Mimi chooses to pass as white—but that choice has costs of its own. And as she travels from Atlanta to Philadelphia to Harlem in search of a place to belong, her sense of self begins to break down.

On a sweltering summer night in 1925, beauties in beaded dresses mingle with hepcats in dapper suits on the streets of Harlem. The air is thick with reefer smoke, and jazz pours out of speakeasy doorways. Ben Charles and his devoted wife, Angeline, are among the locals crammed into a basement club to hear jazz and drink bootleg liquor. For aspiring poet Ben, the swirling, heady rhythms are a revelation. So is Baby Back Johnston, an ambitious trumpet player who flashes a devilish grin and blasts jazz dynamite from his horn.

Vera Kincaid had everything to live for. The wife of a wealthy preacher man, she was smart, beautiful, and popular. But lovely wives often have dark secrets. Vera was no exception. When Vera is found dead, society reporter Lanie Price launches an investigation into the death of a woman she held dear and finds out that, for Vera, forbidden love had deadly consequences. Lanie's investigation takes her deep into the heart of a world where elegance masks deception and trust is a dangerous game. As Lanie peels back the layers of Vera's life, she discovers a tale of forbidden love and deadly ...

Eve is a recovering drug addict, who was just released from prison to a female Christian halfway house. She signed up for the halfway house not to recover but to learn how to stop using drugs so often. Eve has no intentions of staying clean until she meets Reverend Washington. Reverend Washington's wife dies during childbirth, and Eve seduces the newly widowed reverend until she becomes his new wife and the mother to the reverend's three young children. But Eve is very resentful of the deceased Mrs. Washington and plots to make her husband's first wife look like a lying adulterer.

In four decades, bookended by the Pope’s visits to Ireland in September 1979 and August 2018, Ireland has become one of the wealthiest and most progressive nations in the world. Characteristically brilliant and timely, Renaissance Nation is a thrilling account of Ireland’s vertiginous rise and a timely exploration of its conflicted present, where stark decisions await the next generation of would-be revolutionaries.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Brautigan was a counter-cultural celebrity, a writer that the would-be hip just had to read. The problem was that his fame did not rest on the considerable literary virtues of his work but, to a great extent, on a mediated image of cool hippie/rock star exemplified by the photograph of him on the cover of his breakthrough novel, Trout Fishing in America. When nobody wanted tie-dye shirts and gurus any more, they didn’t want Brautigan either. Academics have followed the public’s lead: this is the first book-length study of Brautigan in English ...

Eric Walrond was a singular voice of the Harlem Renaissance, and Tropic Death is his most famous work - a collection that highlights his particular strength as a writer of short fiction. Over the course of these ten stories, Walrond vividly details the punishing realities of life and labor across the Caribbean, and yet the overall effect is far from grim. These are unsentimental yet startlingly beautiful portraits of the migrant experience, full of distinctive voices striving for an audience in a seemingly implacable world.

When the curtains rise on Angelina Weld Grimké’s devastating drama, the Lovings—a Black family from the South—have settled into a small but immaculate apartment in an unnamed northern city. The widowed matriarch, Mary; her daughter, Rachel; and her son, Tom anticipate a more promising future here, but Rachel, a sensitive young woman, has a sudden reckoning with the past that throws her future into serious doubt.

Published to great acclaim in 1873, Walter Pater’s compendium of idiosyncratic, impressionistic essays on the Renaissance gained him a reputation as a daring modern philosopher. Oscar Wilde called it the “holy writ of beauty.” It was Pater’s cry of “art for art’s sake” that became the manifesto for the aesthetic movement. He believed that art should be sensual and that beauty should rank as the highest ideal. Marked by elegant fluency, Pater’s essays discuss Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other artists who, for him, embodied the spirit of the Renaissance.

For 1920's society reporter Lanie Price, the photographer found shot through the eye in the back of his studio isn't just another story. It's personal. On a dank night in September, Lanie is called to the scene of a grisly double murder. The victims: a beloved neighborhood photographer and a dazzling Cotton Club beauty. The suspect: the dead man's jealous wife. The cops say she did it and an outraged community believes them. Can Lanie save an innocent woman from a date with the electric chair—or is this innocent woman not so innocent after all? Join Lanie for another suspenseful trip ...

Romantic Dialogues, first published in 2000, contributed to the modern recovery of a transatlantic dimension in literary studies. Part 1 of the book reassesses the events of 1776 as a painful amputation, severing one part of a close-knit republican community from the other. It looks at English visions of America, from Blake’s America, to Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, and at Romantic Americans such Samuel Williams, William Ellery Channing, Gilbert Imlay and Estwick Evans, who absorbed England’s Romantic revolution long before America’s literary awakening took place. It ...

A civil rights activist and key figure in African American literary history, Alice Dunbar-Nelson made her mark during the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Violets and Other Tales is her debut (included here in full, save for three stories later updated in The Goodness of St. Rocque). The collection includes poetry, short stories, and essays offering a varied examination of class differences, racial identity, oppression, intolerance, and women’s societal roles. The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories assembles 14 of Dunbar’s short works of fiction.

If so, you are already somewhat familiar with the Renaissance, which saw a rebirth in the arts and science. Great strides were made in several fields, and many men made a name for themselves by creating masterpieces or developing new theories, even if some people found them controversial. This comprehensive guide digs into some of the most famous figures of the period and includes some who might not be as well known.

Old loves, festering hatreds, and buried family secrets collide in this sweeping tale of Jazz Age New York. David McKay has returned from the dead, and he's on a mission to uncover the truth about his sister's brutal death in the glittering world of the Harlem Renaissance. As a civil rights attorney, he disappeared while investigating a lynching, but now he's back and determined to expose the lies, hypocrisy, and betrayal that lurk behind the facade of the Jazz Age. But with each day that passes, he gets closer to the dangerous secrets that could lead to his downfall. Will his enemies ...

Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) is regarded by many as a seminal work in the history of African American writing. It is generally called a novel, but it could more accurately be described as a collection of short stories, poems and dramatic pieces whose stylistic indeterminacy is part of its unique appeal. The ambiguities and seeming oddities of Toomer’s text make Cane a difficult work to understand, which is why this lucid, accessible guide is so valuable. Exploring some of the difficulties that both the writer and his work embody, Gerry Carlin offers an enthralling account of Toomer’s ...

When the body of N’Gana Frimbo, the African conjure-man, is discovered in his consultation room, Perry Dart, one of Harlem’s 10 Black police detectives, is called in to investigate. Together with Dr Archer, a physician from across the street, Dart is determined to solve the baffling mystery, helped and hindered by Bubber Brown and Jinx Jenkins, local boys keen to clear themselves of suspicion of murder and undertake their own investigations.

The fifth in the new Naxos Audiobooks series "In a Nutshell", The Renaissance is a short and accessible introduction to the era that gave us Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Palestrina. The Renaissance swept across Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, heralding intellectual revolutions in science, art, philosophy and politics, and marking a decisive shift towards modern thinking.

Melody, Asia, and Sasha are successful women working in the careers they've always wanted. They excel in life, they excel in their chosen professions, but in their relationships, they fail miserably. From scandalous affairs and drug-induced sexcapades to secret pregnancies and death in a love triangle, these cousins have the personal drama on lock. But when backstabbing and betrayal infiltrate their relationships with one another, the once-tight trio quickly finds that blood is nowhere near as thick as water.

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Renaissance, then pay attention.