Catalog Search Results
1) Passing
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English
Description
"Nella Larsen's second novel, Passing, first published in 1929, is a fascinating exploration of race and identity set amidst the blossoming Harlem Renaissance. Irene Redfield is a Black woman living an affluent, comfortable life with her husband and children in the thriving neighborhood of Harlem in the 1920s. When she reconnects with her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who is similarly light-skinned, Irene discovers that Clare has been passing for...
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Appears on list
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Coleman Silk is a respected professor at a New England college who suddenly finds his life unraveling after a comment he makes about some African-American students is misinterpreted as a racial slur. As the scandal heats up, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer researching a biography of Silk, begins to dig deeply into Silk's life. Eventually, matters are made worse when Coleman's affair with a young married janitor named Faunia Farley is exposed. But amid...
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English
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Mark Twain's darkly comic short classic set in the antebellum South stands as a literary condemnation of slavery and racial inequality. Each enriched classic edition includes: A concise introduction that gives readers important background information. A chronology of the author's life and work. A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context. An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations....
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In the musty attic of an upstate New York house, a woman finds a clasped box, hidden away for over a century. Inside, wrapped in cambric and tied with a green ribbon, is an old manuscript written by a girl dreaming of a better life, fighting for survival, and coming of age in a time of chaos and danger. This wondrously told tale is a stirring adventure set in nineteenth-century England, a novel of rich history and vibrant imagination.
Amid the...
Amid the...
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English
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The House Behind the Cedars (1900) is African-American writer Charles Chesnutt's debut novel. Inspired by his own experience as a Black man capable of passing for white-which Chesnutt consciously chose not to do-as well as by Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, The House Behind the Cedars explores themes of identity, race, and class in the post-Civil War South.
Controversial for its portrayal of interracial romance, Chesnutt's novel was critically acclaimed...
7) Think twice
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English
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"Bennie Rosato looks exactly like her identical twin, Alice Connelly, but the darkness in Alice's soul makes them two very different women. Or at least that's what Bennie believes--until she finds herself buried alive at the hands of her twin. Meanwhile, Alice takes over Bennie's life, impersonating her at work and even seducing her boyfriend in order to escape the deadly mess she has made of her own life. But Alice underestimates Bennie and the evil...
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Looking for adventure in her life, Harriet, the Duchess of Berrow, dresses as a man and accompanies other nobles to the estate of Lord Justinian Strange, where he hosts a rollicking fete that would mean scandal to any proper lady. When the two finally meet, they fall in love, but can he see past all her disguises?
9) Forbidden
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Series
Old West series volume 1
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English
Description
Rhine Fontaine is building the successful life he's always dreamed of--one that depends upon him passing for White. But for the first time in years, he wishes he could step out from behind the facade. The reason: Eddy Carmichael, the young woman he rescued in the desert. Outspoken, defiant, and beautiful, Eddy tempts Rhine in ways that could cost him everything ... and the price seems worth paying. Eddy owes her life to Rhine, but she won't risk her...
10) Boy, snow, bird
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English
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A reimagining of the fairy tale Snow White recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity set in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty, the opposite of the life she's left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a...
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A story of suspect miracles, tests of faith, and the corrosive and redemptive power of secrecy. Over the years, Father Damian has seen the reservation through its most severe crises, yet he is more than a heroic priest. He has lived with and served the Ojibwa people as a man of the cloth, and also as a woman. However, where does fact end and reality begin? NPR sponsorships. Deals with miracles, crises of faith, struggles with good & evil, temptation,...
12) Ghost legion
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English
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Against the backdrop of the War for Independence, two intriguing storylines emerge. Stuart Brodie is a black freedman from Charles Town who owns a tavern in the backcountry of South Carolina. On his return from the war, he finds his younger brother, Ezekiel, hanging from the limb of a tree, his tavern burned to the ground, and a note warning any passerby that this is what lies in store for all Tories. Knowing that the guilty party was allied with...
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English
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"Pittsburgh, 1995. The son of a black father he's never known, and a white mother he sometimes wishes he didn't, twenty-two year-old Bobby Saraceno has passed for white his entire life. Raised by his bigoted maternal grandfather, Bobby has hidden the truth about his identity from everyone, even his best friend and fellow comic-book geek, Aaron, who has just returned home from prison a newly radicalized white supremacist. Bobby's disparate worlds crash...
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English
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Luna--or depending on who's asking, Rose--is the white-passing daughter of an immigrant mother who has seen what happens to people from her culture. This world is prejudicial, and she must hide her identity in pursuit of owning an illegal jazz club. Using her cunning powers, Rose negotiates with dangerous criminals as she climbs up Kansas City's bootlegging ladder. Luna, however, runs the risk of losing everything if the crooked city councilmen and...
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"When Kitty Karr Tate, a White icon of the silver screen, dies and bequeaths her multimillion-dollar estate to the St. John sisters, three young, wealthy Black women, it prompts questions. Lots of questions. A celebrity in her own right, Elise St. John would rather focus on sorting out Kitty's affairs than deal with the press. But what she discovers in one of Kitty's journals rocks her world harder than any other brewing scandal could--and between...
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English
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Nella Larsen was an important writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. While she was not prolific, her work was powerful and critically acclaimed. Collected here are both, of her novels, "Passing" and "Quicksand", as well as all three of her published short stories; "Freedom," "The Wrong Man", and "Sanctuary". "Quicksand" was autobiographical in nature and examined a woman's need for sexual fulfilment balanced against respectability and acceptance...
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Appears on these lists
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"The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's personal librarian-who became one of the most powerful women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept in order to make her dreams come true, from New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict and acclaimed author Victoria Christopher Murray. In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. Pierpont Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books,...
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The story of a black man who passes for white and becomes a race-baiting U.S. senator. When he is shot on the Senate floor, the first visitor in hospital is a black musician-turned-preacher who raised him. As the two men talk, their respective stories come out. An unfinished novel by the author of Invisible Man.
19) Smuggled
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English
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In the final winter of the Second Word War, five-year-old Éva Farkas is sewn into a flour sack and smuggled across the Hungarian border to Romania. She is renamed Anca and forbidden to speak Hungarian ever again. When the pillars of Communism finally crumble, Anca returns to Hungary to find a home and reclaim the name her mother gave her.
20) The gilded years
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English
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"Since childhood, Anita Hemmings has longed to attend the country's most exclusive school for women, Vassar College. Now, a bright, beautiful senior in the class of 1897, she is hiding a secret that would have banned her from admission: Anita is the only African-American student ever to attend Vassar. With her olive complexion and dark hair, this daughter of a janitor and descendant of slaves has successfully passed as white, but now finds herself...
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