A flood brings not only rising waters but the full force of a brutal, racist worldWith the Mississippi flooding, a Black farmer struggles to get his pregnant wife to safety. In the chaos, a single desperate decision sets off a chain of events that cannot be undone. Down By the Riverside is Richard Wright’s unflinching novella of race, power and consequence. Starkly told and painfully resonant, it captures how quickly the world can turn – and who is forced ...

Black Boy (1945) is an autobiography by Richard Wright.The author explores his childhood, race relations in the South, and his eventual move to Chicago, where he establishes his writing career and becomes involved with the Communist Party.(Linked Table of Contents)

New York Times Bestseller • One of the Best Books of the Year by Time magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and Esquire, and one ofOprah’s 15 Favorite Books of the YearRead by actor Ethan HerisseFrom the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy, the novel he was unable to publish during his lifetime—an explosive story of racism, injustice,...

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels“If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr.Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son, a masterpie...

Savage Holiday, first published in 1954 by noted American author Richard Wright, is a tense, well-written psychological thriller about Erskine Fowler, an insurance executive forced into early retirement, who, over the course of a bizarre weekend, is responsible for the accidental death of his neighbor's young son. Tragic consequences follow as Fowler attempts to redeem himself and is forced to question his own life, as events spiral out-of-control to their inevitable concl...

Native Son (1940) is a novel by American author Richard Wright. The novel tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black American youth living in utter poverty. Bigger lived in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s and is a convicted criminal.according to his lawyers there is no escape from this destiny for his client or any other black American, since they are the necessary product of the society that formed them and told them since birth who exactly they were su...

A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson.When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, ther...

The fight to survive is all in the mind.There is nothing exceptional about Greg Summers, until the day he returns home to discover that his wife no longer recognises him and is married to a stranger using his name.Perhaps it is an elaborate hoax, yet that wouldn’t explain his vivid flashbacks to childhood, or the violent eruptions of blood that accompany them. Nor does it explain the stray memories that seem to belong to an entirely separate man called Richard James...

Native Son is a third person narrative that intimately revolves around an African American named Bigger Thomas in the 1930's. He lives in poverty with his family and is a delinquent. To aggravate his poor life even more, Bigger also lives in a racist society where white people despise black people.One day, Bigger is admitted for a job, which is to be the chauffeur of the Dalton Family, a rich and powerful white family. Through experiencing this new, peculiar and maybe even irritati...

'Powerful as [Richard Wright] was - is - as a writer, nobody can surpass him in doing certain kinds of writing... He is courageous - he was able to look into areas that nobody at that time was willing to look at' Toni MorrisonCross Damon is disenchanted. At odds with society, and with himself, his idealism and sense of alienation have driven him to drink and incessant reflection. But when Cross is mistakenly reported to have died, he is suddenly free to put his ide...

"Doon the wynds an' up the streets,Where revenants sought souls tae eat,The Butcher called for twitching meatAn' Burke an' Hare did answer."-anon.A year after the Cadaver Riots tore the heart from Edinburgh. Fear still chokes the Old Town, for though the revenants were driven back with shot and steel, they still lurk in the city's shadowed closes. When night falls, they strike.In dissecting room...

New York Times Bestseller • One of the Best Books of the Year: Time magazine, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and Esquire • One of Oprah’s 15 Favorite Books of the YearFrom the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy, the novel he was unable to publish during his lifetime—an explosive story of racism, injustice, brutality, and survival. "Not just Wright's ma...