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Black History 365: An Inclusive Account Of American History (50 Stars)
by Walter MiltonBlack History 365 is an educational entity whose purpose is to create cutting-edge resources that invite students, educators, and other readers to become critical thinkers, compassionate listeners, fact-based, respectful communicators and action-oriented solutionists.
The Black Humanist Tradition in Anti-Racist Literature: A Fragile Hope (Studies in Humanism and Atheism)
by Alexandra HartmannThis book presents an intellectual history and theoretical exploration of black humanism since the civil rights era. Humanism is a human-centered approach to life that considers human beings to be responsible for the world and its course of history. Both the heavily theistic climate in the United States as well as the dominance of the Black Church are responsible for black humanism’s existence in virtual oblivion. For those who believe the world to be one without supernatural interventions, human action matters greatly and is the only possible mode for change. Humanists are thus committed to promoting the public good through human effort rather than through faith. Black humanism originates from the lived experiences of African Americans in a white hegemonic society. Viewed from this perspective, black humanist cultural expressions are a continuous push to imagine and make room for alternative life options in a racist society. Alexandra Hartmann counters religion’s hegemonic grasp and uncovers black humanism as a small yet significant tradition in recent African American culture and cultural politics by studying its impact on African American literature and the ensuing anti-racist potentials. The book demonstrates that black humanism regards subjectivity as embodied and is thus a worldview that is characterized by a fragile hope regarding the possibility of progress – racial and otherwise – in the country.
Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America
by Charles AthanasopoulosIn the decade since the 2014 Ferguson Uprising, re-intensified conversations about racial progress continue to be at the forefront of American culture. The moniker Black Lives Matter, for example, emerged as a rallying cry of Black-led mass rebellions calling into question the rigid Western social codes of race, gender, class, and sexuality. These values emerge through iconography: those social codes reflected by a corresponding rolodex of public symbols (whether positive or negative) in American culture. Black Lives Matter fractured icons such as the first Black president, the innocent police officer, and the charismatic Black male activist opening space for new theories and practices of Black radical disruption. At the same time, groups such as #BLM10, BLM Grassroots, and Mass Action for Black Liberation criticize the Black Lives Matter Global Network as having transformed into a new icon of racial progress, demonstrating that the meaning of Black liberation remains hotly contested. How do we discern Black radical thought and activism from the co-options of Western Man? Are we doomed to repeat a cycle of destroying a few icons only to inevitably produce new ones? In Black Iconoclasm, Charles Athanasopoulos dismantles the Eurocentric notion of iconoclasm as the physical destruction of icons and/or the recovery of supposedly pure counter-ideologies. Instead, Black iconoclasm refers to a liminal orientation toward cracks and fissures in narratives of linear racial progress and teleological narratives of Black liberation. Athanasopoulos examines conflicting messages surrounding Black liberation in post/Ferguson America across activism, Black radical theory, communicative situations, cinema, and street art. Across each arena of American culture, his orientation toward the liminal unsettles the supposed cyclical nature of icons/iconoclasm by demonstrating that theories and practices of Black radical disruption always reflect both Black radical excess and the iconographic residues of Western Man. Those residues do not preclude those theories/practices from teaching us important lessons, they are how those lessons are learned to evolve our theories and practices of Black radical disruption. Institutional capture is neither simply inevitable just as no movement, person, or idea will be totally immune to Western Man’s racial icons. Thus, Black iconoclasm eschews purity politics and the pursuit of epistemological closure in favor of a critical orientation toward ritual transgression and Black radical discernment. Reframing iconoclasm in this way, Athanasopoulos opens avenues for new approaches to the relationship between Black resistance and the co-option of that resistance.
Black in Print: Plotting the Coordinates of Blackness in Central America (SUNY series, Afro-Latinx Futures)
by Jennifer Carolina Gómez MenjívarBlack in Print examines the role of narrative, from traditional writing to new media, in conversations about race and belonging in the isthmus. It argues that the production, circulation, and consumption of stories has led to a trans-isthmian imaginary that splits the region along racial and geographic lines into a white-mestizo Pacific coast, an Indigenous core, and a Black Caribbean. Across five chapters, Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar identifies a series of key moments in the history of the development of this imaginary: Independence, Intervention, Cold-War, Post-Revolutionary, and Digital Age. Gómez Menjívar's analysis ranges from literary beacons such as Rubén Darío and Miguel Ángel Asturias to less studied intellectuals such as Wingston González and Carl Rigby. The result is a fresh approach to race, the region, and its literature. Black in Print understands Central American Blackness as a set of shifting coordinates plotted on the axes of language, geography, and time as it moves through print media.
The Black Indian in American Literature
by Keely Byars-NicholsThe first book-length study of the figure of the black Indian in American Literature, this project explores themes of nation, culture, and performativity. Moving from the Post-Independence period to the Contemporary era, Byars-Nichols re-centers a marginalized group challenges stereotypes and conventional ways of thinking about race and culture.
Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing
by Stephanie Stokes OliverSpanning over 250 years of history, Black Ink traces black literature in America from Frederick Douglass to Ta-Nehisi Coates in this &“breathtaking anthology celebrating the power of the written word to forge change&” (O, The Oprah Magazine).Throughout American history black people are the only group of people to have been forbidden by law to learn to read. This expansive collection seeks to shed light on that injustice, putting some of America&’s most cherished voices in a conversation in one magnificent volume that presents reading as an act of resistance. Organized into three sections—the Peril, the Power, and the Pleasure—and featuring a vast array of contributors both classic and contemporary, Black Ink presents the brilliant diversity of black thought in America while solidifying the importance of these writers within the greater context of the American literary tradition. &“This electric and electrifying collection of voices serves to open a much-needed window onto the freedom struggle of black literature. It&’s a marvel, and a genuine gift for readers everywhere&” (Wil Haygood, author of The Butler: A Witness to History). Contributors include: Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture], Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Terry McMillan, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Colson Whitehead. The anthology features a bonus in-depth interview with President Barack Obama.
Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing
by Stephanie Stokes Oliver Nikki GiovanniSpanning over 250 years of history, Black Ink traces black literature in America from Frederick Douglass to Ta-Nehisi Coates in this masterful collection of twenty-five illustrious and moving essays on the power of the written word.Throughout American history black people are the only group of people to have been forbidden by law to learn to read. This unique collection seeks to shed light on that injustice and subjugation, as well as the hard-won literary progress made, putting some of America’s most cherished voices in a conversation in one magnificent volume that presents reading as an act of resistance. Organized into three sections, the Peril, the Power, and Pleasure, and with an array of contributors both classic and contemporary, Black Ink presents the brilliant diversity of black thought in America while solidifying the importance of these writers within the greater context of the American literary tradition. At times haunting and other times profoundly humorous, this unprecedented anthology guides you through the remarkable experiences of some of America’s greatest writers and their lifelong pursuits of literacy and literature. The foreword was written by Nikki Giovanni. Contributors include: Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture], Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Terry McMillan, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Colson Whitehead. The anthology features a bonus in-depth interview with President Barack Obama.
Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine
by Emily Bernard"I am black--and brown, too," writes Emily Bernard. "Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell." <p><p> And the storytelling, and the mystery of Bernard's storytelling, of getting to the truth, begins with a stabbing in a New England college town. Bernard writes how, when she was a graduate student at Yale, she walked into a coffee shop and, along with six other people, was randomly attacked by a stranger with a knife ("I remember making the decision not to let the oddness of this stranger bother me"). "I was not stabbed because I was black," she writes (the attacker was white), "but I have always viewed the violence I survived as a metaphor for the violent encounter that has generally characterized American race relations. There was no connection between us, yet we were suddenly and irreparably bound by a knife, an attachment that cost us both: him, his freedom; me, my wholeness." <p> Bernard explores how that bizarre act of violence set her free and unleashed the storyteller in her ("The equation of writing and regeneration is fundamental to black American experience"). <p> She writes in Black Is the Body how each of the essays goes beyond a narrative of black innocence and white guilt, how each is anchored in a mystery, and how each sets out to discover a new way of telling the truth as the author has lived it. "Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book." <p> And what most interests Bernard is looking at "blackness at its borders, where it meets whiteness in fear and hope, in anguish and love."
Black Joy
by VariousBlack joy is . . .The babble and buzz of the barber shop.Chicken and chips after school with your girls.Stepping foot in your mother country for the very first time.Feeling at one with nature.Learning to cook souse with your mum.Connecting with the only other Black colleague in your workplace.Loving and finding complete happiness in your fatness.Joy surrounds us. It can be found it in the day to day. It's what we live for. So why do we so rarely allow ourselves to revel in it? This must-read anthology is your invitation to do so - and is a true celebration of Black British culture in all its glory.Edited by award-winning journalist, and former gal-dem editor-in-chief, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff and up-and-coming talent Timi Sotire, twenty-eight iconic voices speak on what Black joy means to them in this uplifting and empowering anthology.With essays from:Munya Chawawa -- Leigh-Anne Pinnock -- Diane Abbott -- Jason Okundaye --Bukky Bakray -- Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé -- Lavinya Stennett -- Henrie Kwushue Chanté Joseph -- Travis Alabanza -- Isaac James -- Sophia Tassew -- Lauryn Green -- Melz Owusu -- Timi Sotire -- Fope Olaleye -- Richie Brave -- Tope Olufemi -- Athian Akec -- Mikai Mcdermott -- Ife Grillo -- Rukiat Ashawe -- Mayowa Quadri -- Tobi Kyeremateng -- Haaniyah Angus -- Theophina Gabriel -- Ruby Fatimilehin -- Vanessa Kissule---"A refreshing and invigorating burst of joy, exploring the beauty in the nuances of our existence, honing in on what propels us forward, and establishing a vital hope" - BOLU BABALOLA, author of Love in Colour"Every bit as joyous as the title suggests'" CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS, author of Queenie"A rich, gorgeous celebration of the power in embracing joy" LIV LITTLE"Black Joy is a delightful celebration of Black Britishness" MASHABLE
Black Knights: Arabic Epic and the Making of Medieval Race
by Rachel SchineA new account of racial logics in premodern Islamic literature. In Black Knights, Rachel Schine reveals how the Arabic-speaking world developed a different form of racial knowledge than their European neighbors during the Middle Ages. Unlike in European vernaculars, Arabic-language ideas about ethnic difference emerged from conversations extending beyond the Mediterranean, from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. In these discourses, Schine argues, racialized blackness became central to ideas about a global, ethnically inclusive Muslim world. Schine traces the emergence of these new racial logics through popular Islamic epics, drawing on legal, medical, and religious literatures from the period to excavate a diverse and ever-changing conception of blackness and race. The result is a theoretically nuanced case for the existence and malleability of racial logics in premodern Islamic contexts across a variety of social and literary formations.
Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America
by Professor Nadia NurhusseinThe first book to explore how African American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesAs the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held significance for and captivated the imaginations of African Americans. In Black Land, Nadia Nurhussein delves into nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artistic and journalistic depictions of Ethiopia, illuminating the increasing tensions and ironies behind cultural celebrations of an African country asserting itself as an imperial power.Nurhussein navigates texts by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Harry Dean, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, and others, alongside images and performances that show the intersection of African America with Ethiopia during historic political shifts. From a description of a notorious 1920 Star Order of Ethiopia flag-burning demonstration in Chicago to a discussion of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1935, Nurhussein illuminates the growing complications that modern Ethiopia posed for American writers and activists. American media coverage of the African nation exposed a clear contrast between the Pan-African ideal and the modern reality of Ethiopia as an antidemocratic imperialist state: Did Ethiopia represent the black nation of the future, or one of an inert and static past?Revising current understandings of black transnationalism, Black Land presents a well-rounded exploration of an era when Ethiopia’s presence in African American culture was at its height.
Black Like Me (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series)
by SparkNotesBlack Like Me (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by John Howard Griffin Making the reading experience fun! Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster.Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides:chapter-by-chapter analysis explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols a review quiz and essay topics Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers.
Black Linguistics: Language, Society and Politics in Africa and the Americas
by Foreword by wa Thiong'o Arnetha Ball Sinfree Makoni Geneva Smitherman Arthur K. SpearsEnslavement, forced migration, war and colonization have led to the global dispersal of Black communities and to the fragmentation of common experiences.The majority of Black language researchers explore the social and linguistic phenomena of individual Black communities, without looking at Black experiences outside a given community. This groundbreaking collection re-orders the elitist and colonial elements of language studies by drawing together the multiple perspectives of Black language researchers. In doing so, the book recognises and formalises the existence of a "Black Linguistic Perspective" highlights the contributions of Black language researchers in the field.Written exclusively by Black scholars on behalf of, and in collaboration with local communities, the book looks at the commonalities and differences among Black speech communities in Africa and the Diaspora. Topics include:* the OJ Simpson trial* language issues in Southern Africa and Francophone West Africa* the language of Hip Hop* the language of the Rastafaria in JamaicaWith a foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, this is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the linguistic implications of colonization.
Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored
by Jeffrey BoakyeAFRO-CARIBBEAN. COLOURED. ETHNIC MINORITY. IMMIGRANT. BAME. URBAN. WOKE. FAM. BLACK.These are just some of the terms being wrestled with in Black, Listed, an exploration of twenty-first century Black identity told through a list of insults, insights and everything in between. Taking a panoramic look at global Black history and contemporary culture, this book investigates the ways in which Black communities (and individuals) have been represented, oppressed, mimicked, celebrated and othered. Part autobiographical musing, part pop culture vivisection, it's a comprehensive attempt to make sense of blackness from the vantage point of the hilarious and insightful psyche of Jeffrey Boakye. PRAISE FOR BLACK, LISTED: 'This book gives a voice to those whose experience is persistently defined, refined and denied by others' David Lammy, Guardian 'A panoramic exploration of black identity' Elle'Urgent, timely reading' AnOther Magazine 'Inventive, refreshing and humorous' Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other 'A truly radical book, which manages to be unflinching and constantly entertaining' Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller
Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored
by Jeffrey BoakyeGUARDIAN MUST READ BOOKS OF 2019 FINANCIAL TIMES BOOKS TO READ 2019 NEW STATESMAN MUST READS 2019'A truly radical book, which manages to be unflinching and constantly entertaining' CAROLINE SANDERSON, THE BOOKSELLER BOOK OF THE MONTH APRIL 2019'This book gives a voice to those whose experience is persistently defined, refined and denied by others' DAVID LAMMY, GUARDIAN *Who is a roadman really? What's wrong with calling someone a 'lighty'? Why do people think black guys are cool?These are just some of the questions being wrestled with in Black, Listed, an exploration of 21st century black identity told through a list of insults, insights and everything in-between.Taking a panoramic look at global black history, interrogating both contemporary and historical culture, Black, Listed investigates the ways in which black communities (and individuals) have been represented, oppressed, mimicked, celebrated, and othered. Part historical study, part autobiographical musing, part pop culture vivisection, it's a comprehensive attempt to make sense of blackness from the vantage point of the hilarious and insightful psyche of Jeffrey Boakye. Along the way, it explores a far reaching range of social and cultural contexts, including but not limited to, sport, art, entertainment, politics, literature, history, music, theatre, cinema, education and criminal justice, sometimes at the same time.
Black Literature and Literary Theory (Routledge Library Editions: Literary Theory #13)
by Henry Louis Gates JrThe imaginative literature of African and Afro-American authors writing in Western languages has long been seen as standing outside the Western literary canon. In fact, however, black literature not only has a complex formal relation to that canon, but tends to revise and reflect Western rhetorical strategies even more than it echoes black vernacular literary forms. This book, first published in 1984, is divided into two sections, thus clarifying the nature of black literary theory on the one hand, and the features of black literary practice on the other. Rather than merely applying contemporary Western theory to black literature, these critics instead challenge and redefine the theory in order to make fresh, stimulating comments not only on black criticism and literature but also on the general state of criticism today.
Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible
by Imtiaz HabibContaining an urgently needed archival database of historical evidence, this volume includes both a consolidated presentation of the documentary records of black people in Tudor and Stuart England, and an interpretive narrative that confirms and significantly extends the insights of current theoretical excursus on race in early modern England. Here for the first time Imtiaz Habib collects the scattered references to black people-whether from Africa, India or America-in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and arranges them into a systematic, chronological descriptive index. He offers an extended historical and theoretical interpretation of the records in six chapters, which serve as an introductory guide to the index even as they articulate a specific argument about the meaning of the records. Both the archival information and interpretive scholarship provide a strong framework from which future historical debates on race in early modern England can proceed.
Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art (Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future)
by Sarah Phillips CasteelIn a little-known chapter of World War II, Black people living in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were subjected to ostracization, forced sterilization, and incarceration in internment and concentration camps. In the absence of public commemoration, African diaspora writers and artists have preserved the stories of these forgotten victims of the Third Reich. Their works illuminate the relationship between creative expression and wartime survival and the role of art in the formation of collective memory.This groundbreaking book explores a range of largely overlooked literary and artistic works that challenge the invisibility of Black wartime history. Emphasizing Black agency, Sarah Phillips Casteel examines both testimonial art by victims of the Nazi regime and creative works that imaginatively reconstruct the wartime period. Among these are the internment art of Caribbean painter Josef Nassy, the survivor memoir of Black German journalist Hans J. Massaquoi, the jazz fiction of African American novelist John A. Williams and Black Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, and the photomontages of Scottish Ghanaian visual artist Maud Sulter. Bridging Black and Jewish studies, this book identifies the significance of African diaspora experiences and artistic expression for Holocaust history, memory, and representation.
Black Madness: : Mad Blackness
by Therí Alyce PickensIn Black Madness :: Mad Blackness Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madness. Pickens considers Butler's Fledgling as an archive of Black madness that demonstrates how race and ability shape subjectivity while constructing the building blocks for antiracist and anti-ableist futures. She examines how Hopkinson's Midnight Robber theorizes mad Blackness and how Due's African Immortals series contests dominant definitions of the human. The theorizations of race and disability that emerge from these works, Pickens demonstrates, challenge the paradigms of subjectivity that white supremacy and ableism enforce, thereby pointing to the potential for new forms of radical politics.
Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson
by Keith ClarkFrom Frederick Douglass to the present, the preoccupation of black writers with manhood and masculinity is a constant. Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson explores how in their own work three major African American writers contest classic portrayals of black men in earlier literature, from slave narratives through the great novels of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Keith Clark examines short stories, novels, and plays by Baldwin, Gaines, and Wilson, arguing that since the 1950s the three have interrupted and radically dismantled the constricting literary depictions of black men who equate selfhood with victimization, isolation, and patriarchy. Instead, they have reimagined black men whose identity is grounded in community, camaraderie, and intimacy. Delivering original and startling insights, this book will appeal to scholars and students of African American literature, gender studies, and narratology.
Black Men Worshipping
by Stacy C. Boyd"Black Men Worshipping" analyzes the discursive spaces where black Christian masculinity is constructed, performed, and contested in American religion and culture. It judiciously considers the anxiety that emerges from black male negotiations with constructions of blackness, maleness, and Christian embodiment. "Black Men Worshipping" places fictive literary narratives such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "In My Father's House," and film narratives such as "The Green Mile" in dialogue with the non-fictive narratives of popular African American figures Bishop T. D. Jakes and Pastor Donnie McClurkin in an effort to provide a snapshot of the complex constellation of issues involved in black male Christian embodiment.
Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (The Middle Ages Series)
by Cord J. WhitakerIn the late Middle Ages, Christian conversion could wash a black person's skin white—or at least that is what happens when a black sultan converts to Christianity in the English romance King of Tars. In Black Metaphors, Cord J. Whitaker examines the rhetorical and theological moves through which blackness and whiteness became metaphors for sin and purity in the English and European Middle Ages—metaphors that guided the development of notions of race in the centuries that followed. From a modern perspective, moments like the sultan's transformation present blackness and whiteness as opposites in which each condition is forever marked as a negative or positive attribute; medieval readers were instead encouraged to remember that things that are ostensibly and strikingly different are not so separate after all, but mutually construct one another. Indeed, Whitaker observes, for medieval scholars and writers, blackness and whiteness, and the sin and salvation they represent, were held in tension, forming a unified whole.Whitaker asks not so much whether race mattered to the Middle Ages as how the Middle Ages matters to the study of race in our fraught times. Looking to the treatment of color and difference in works of rhetoric such as John of Garland's Synonyma, as well as in a range of vernacular theological and imaginative texts, including Robert Manning's Handlyng Synne, and such lesser known romances as The Turke and Sir Gawain, he illuminates the process by which one interpretation among many became established as the truth, and demonstrates how modern movements—from Black Lives Matter to the alt-right—are animated by the medieval origins of the black-white divide.
The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages (The New Middle Ages)
by Matthew X. VernonThe Black Middle Ages examines the influence of medieval studies on African-American thought. Matthew X. Vernon focuses on nineteenth century uses of medieval texts to structure racial identity, but also considers the flexibility of medieval narratives more broadly in the medieval period, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book engages disparate discourses to reassess African-American positionalities in time and space. Utilizing a transhistorical framework, Vernon reflects on medieval studies as a discipline built upon a contended set of ideologies and acts of imaginative appropriation visible within source texts and their later mobilizations.
Black Milk
by Elif ShafakBlack Milk is the affecting and beautifully written memoir on motherhood and writing by Turkey's bestselling female writer Elif Shafak, author of Honour, The Gaze and The Bastard of Istanbul which was long-listed for the Orange prize. Postpartum depression affects millions of new mothers every year, and- like most of its victims- Elif Shafak never expected to be one of them. But after the birth of her first child in 2006, the internationally bestselling Turkish author remembers how "for the first time my adult life . . . words wouldn't speak to me". As her despair finally eased, Shafak sought to resuscitate her writing life by chronicling her own experiences. In her intimate memoir, she reveals how she struggled to overcome her depression and how literature provided the salvation she so desperately needed. 'An intimate, affecting memoir . . . Her passion for literature is contagious, and her struggle with postpartum depression and writer's block reinforces how carefully all of us must tread. Beautifully rendered, Shafak's Black Milk is an epic poem to women everywhere' Colleen Mondor Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love and is the most widely read female novelist in Turkey. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is a contributor for The Telegraph, Guardian and the New York Times and her TED talk on the politics of fiction has received 500 000 viewers since July 2010. She is married with two children and divides her time between Istanbul and London.
Black Moon
by Matthew SweeneyNegotiating the borders and hinterlands of Central and Eastern Europe - with occasional coracle trips or forays to Antarctica for a round of golf - the homesick flaneur surveys the surrounding devastation with the same mixture of fascination and alarm he feels when he discovers the sweat-mark on his T-shirt makes a perfect map of Ireland. All around, he sees natural and man-made catastrophe: the ruins and remnants of war peopled by kidnappers and assassins, feral dogs, death squads, the dispossessed and deracinated. These poems are parables of threat, parties for the end of the world; they speak eloquently of damage, displacement and the resulting swell of terror: 'I looked back at the door heard the lock click, then beyondanother lock, then another.'