Diversifying the classics

Esi decides to divorce after enduring yet another morning's marital rape. Though her friends and family remain baffled by her decision (after all, he doesn't beat her!), Esi holds fast. When she falls in love with a married man-wealthy, and able to arrange a polygamous marriage-the modern woman finds herself trapped in a new set of problems.

"A hardcover edition of James Baldwin's classic coming-of-age novel set in Harlem in the 1930s, with a new introduction by Edwidge Danticat"-- "The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision,...

A remarkable account of early slavery and later freedom, "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano" is the 1789 autobiography of former slave Olaudah Equiano. His life is a tale of terror, as well as an exciting adventure. He tells of his abduction from Africa at the age of ten, and his subsequent years of labor on slave ships. During and after this time, he fervently attempts to gain independence: he studies the Bible and carefully...

Born in 1868 the son of an Oglala chief, Luther Standing Bear was in the first class at Carlisle, witnessed the Ghost Dance uprising from the Pine Ridge Reservation, toured Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and devoted his later years to the Indian rights movement of the 1920s. His autobiography, first published in 1928, gives a rare inside view by an Indian who successfully made the transition from tribal life to the white man's world. My...

The groundbreaking first novel in Tsitsi Dangarembga's award-winning trilogy, Nervous Conditions won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and has been "hailed as one of the 20th century's most significant works of African literature" (The New York Times). Two decades before Zimbabwe would win independence and ended white minority rule, thirteen-year-old Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her education. On her shoulders rest the economic hopes of her parents,...

One of the twentieth century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career.

The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous,

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In the tenth century, Japan was both physically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world. The Pillow Book recaptures this lost world with the diary of a young court lady. Sei Shōnagon was a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the well-known novel The Tale of Genji. Unlike the latter's fictionalized view of the Heian-era court, Shōnagon's journal provides a lively miscellany of anecdotes, observations, and gossip, intended to be...

"Shusaku Endo's classic novel of enduring faith in dangerous times"Silence I regard as a masterpiece, a lucid and elegant drama."-The New York Times Book Review Seventeenth-century Japan: Two Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to a country hostile to their religion, where feudal lords force the faithful to publicly renounce their beliefs. Eventually captured and forced to watch their Japanese Christian brothers lay down their lives for their faith,...

The contemporary African writer's classic novel depicting the destruction of traditional tribal life by the white man