**WINNER OF THE CWA HISTORICAL DAGGER AWARD 2024!For fans of Colson Whitehead and Wild Women and the Blues, Viper's Dream is a gritty, daring look at the vibrant jazz scene of midcentury Harlem, and one man’s dreams of making it big and finding love in a world that wants to keep him down.**Harlem, 1936. Clyde “The Viper” Morton boards a train from Alabama to Harlem to chase his dreams of being a jazz musician. When his talent fails him, he...

Marva Dobbs has a life most people would envy. An American who has lived in Paris for most of her adult life, she runs a popular African-American soul food restaurant, and her thirty-year marriage has produced a beautiful grown-up daughter. So why is she jeopardizing everything for a fling with her sous-chef, a mysterious twenty-eight-year-old Algerian man named Hassan?Marva begins to ask herself the same question when she returns from summer vacation to find that Hassan is missing,...

WinnerFor fans of Colson Whitehead and Chester Himes, Viper's Dream is a gritty, daring look at the vibrant jazz scene of mid-century Harlem, and one man's dreams of making it big and finding love in a world that wants to keep him down.1936: Clyde 'The Viper' Morton boards a train from Alabama to Harlem to chase his dreams of being a jazz musician. When his talent fails him, he becomes caught up in the dangerous underbelly of Harlem's drug trade. In this he...

Rendezvous Eighteenth marks the emergence of an exciting voice in crime fiction. Ricky Jenks gave up life in the U.S. years ago and is content, if not happy, with his life as a piano player in a small café in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris. He has many friends among the other African-Americans living in Paris and is happily, if casually, involved with a French Muslim woman.But then everything changes. His American life comes crashing down on him when his estranged cou...

From authors including National Book Award winner Pete Hautman, Deadly Ink 2007 winner Darrell James, and renowned social commentator turned short-story writer Mike Davis, Politics Noir is a chilling and subversive collection of new crime stories featuring greed, corruption, insatiable ambition-and murder in the very highest places.

Yes, there is barbecue, but that’s just one course of the meal. With Vinegar and Char the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates twenty years of symposia by offering a collection of poems that are by turns as sophisticated and complex, as vivid and funny, and as buoyant and poignant as any SFA gathering.The roster of contributors includes Natasha Trethewey, Robert Morgan, Atsuro Riley, Adrienne Su, Richard Blanco, Ed Madden, Nikky Finney, Frank X Walker, Sheryl St. Germain,...