Tired of having your search for a romantic partner complicated by the battle of the sexes? Let Dr. Larry E. Davis—a psychologist, social worker, and voice of reason—show you a better way. Now in its revised and updated third edition, Black and Single has been the premier relationship guide for African-Americans for ten years. Filled with entertaining and thought-provoking examples from the real world of dating, it’s a practical, one-of-a-kind tool to help you find the partner you’ve been seeking.

Black and Single: Meeting and Choosing a Partner Who's Right for You (Nia Guide to Black Women)

Davis, Larry E.

Parenting & Relationships

Agate Bolden

A profound, personally engaged anatomy of the codes that have shaped, and continue to shape, black manhood. Marlene Kim Connor reveals cool as a vital code of behaviors and attitudes that plays an often disregarded role in shaping the conception of manhood among young black boys. In this thoughtful, impassioned and provocative book, Connor uncovers cool’s history, explores its essence, and explains why, even though it deserves praise, cool often becomes an insidious force affective black American life today.

What Is Cool?: Understanding Black Manhood in America

Politics & Social Sciences

Connor, Marlene Kim

Social Sciences

Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed Essence bestseller is a blistering satire of American gender, race, and economic relations. Sexual Healing starts by exploring a simple if sensational premisewhat would happen if two black businesswomen started a brothel that served up male sex workers hired and trained to meet black women’s most intimate needs? Jill Nelson uses this set-up as an opportunity to spin a comedy of outrageous manners for the 21st century in her inimitably uninhibited voice. The result is what Ebony called, A post-feminist fable of sexual empowerment that’s smart, explicit, and side-splittingly funny.”

Sexual Healing

Literature & Fiction

Nelson, Jill

Humor & Satire

A remarkably assured and accomplished debut novel that encompasses the bursting life of contemporary Chicago, Looped tells the separate stories of a diverse group of Chicagoans—black, brown, and white, gay, straight, and bi—as their lives unfold in diverging and (occasionally) converging ways over the course of the year 2000. Among the characters are the family of a middle-class black postman whose runaway daughter has just learned she’s pregnant; a gifted half-Vietnamese high-schooler whose troubled father spies on the son he abandoned years earlier; a tradition-bound Greek diner owner whose upwardly mobile daughter, embarrassed by her ethnic roots, is snarled in a loveless marriage; a gay chef whose shaky relationship is strained by the visit of his closeted lover’s uncle, a Catholic priest; and the motley members of an up-and-coming band shaken by the breakup of its ambitious lead guitarist and his sexually confused songwriter girlfriend. Ambitious, sprawling, engrossing, multifaceted, insightful, and addictively readable, Looped explodes with a life and vitality that mirrors the multicultural reality of twenty-first century Chicago, where the families that sustain us are more likely to be those we’ve created than those we’re born to.

Looped

Winston, Andrew

Literary

The newest, most updated book on Prince available today Famously reticent and perennially controversial, Prince was one of the few music superstars who remained, largely, an enigma—even up to his premature death on April 21, 2016. A fixture of the pop canon, Prince is widely held to be the greatest musician of his generation and will undoubtedly remain an inspiring and singular talent. This meticulously researched biography is the most comprehensive work on Prince yet published. Unlike other Prince books, this one eschews speculation into the artist's highly guarded private life and instead focuses deep and sustained attention exactly where it should be: on his work. Acclaimed British novelist and critic Matt Thorne draws on years of research and dozens of interviews with Prince's intimate associates (many of whom have never spoken on record before) to examine every phase of the musician's 35-year career, including nearly every song—released and unreleased—that Prince has recorded. Originally released in the UK in 2012, this first US publication of Prince includes updated content detailing the artist's two 2014 albums, tour, 2015 Tidal release, and other career events. This astonishingly rich, almost encyclopedic biography is a must-have for any serious fan of Prince.

Prince: The Man and His Music

THORNE, MATT

Humor & Entertainment

“Hands down one of the best explorations into the Black male psyche I’ve ever read.” —Essence Never Stop is the wrenching memoir of Simba Sana, the cofounder and former leader of Karibu Books, a major indie-bookselling phenomenon and perhaps the most successful black-owned company in the history of the book industry. In this memoir, Sana reveals how his experience with Karibu jumpstarted his lifelong journey to better understanding himself, human nature, faith, and American culture—which ultimately helped him develop the powerful personal philosophy that drives his life today. Born Bernard Sutton in Washington, DC, Sana grew up in the cycle of poverty and violence that dominated inner-city life in the ’70s and ’80s. Sana’s academic success got him into college, where his life increasingly embodied the contradictions that plagued his youth. Committed to self-improvement and self-discipline, he grew into a successful businessman while becoming an impassioned Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist. He lived the corporate life at Ernst &amp; Young by day while leading radical consciousness-raising groups by night. Building Karibu became Sana’s opportunity to bind the disparate elements of his life together. Ultimately, though, the paradoxes in his identity and his accumulated emotional wounds confounded his effort to overcome his business reversals, and everything Sana built—his marriage, family, and business—was lost in an incredibly brief period of time. Sana had to rebuild his life—and his identity—and set out to do so in a way that focused principally on the meaning and importance of love.

Never Stop: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Sana, Simba

Community & Culture

From award-winning actress Denise Nicholas: a ten-year anniversary reissue of her powerful and dramatic coming of age story set in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Freshwater Road has been called one of the best novels written about the Civil Rights Movement. Nicholas herself has been praised repeatedly over the years for her beautiful prose and is continually mentioned along with Alice Walker and Ernest J. Gaines as the most important novelists documenting this era. When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in Freedom Summer, she's assigned to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier. As the long, hot summer unfolds, Celeste befriends several members of the community, but there are also those who are threatened by her and the change that her presence in the South represents. Finding inner strength as she helps lift the veil of oppression and learns valuable lessons about race, social change, and violence, Celeste prepares her adult students for their showdown with the county registrar. All the while, she struggles with loneliness, a worried father in Detroit, and her burgeoning feelings for Ed Jolivette, a young man also in Mississippi for the summer. By summer's end, Celeste learns there are no easy answers to the questions that preoccupy her—about violence and nonviolence, about race, identity, and color, and about the strength of love and family bonds. In Freshwater Road, Denise Nicholas has created an unforgettable story that—more than ten years after first appearing in print—continues to be one of the most cherished works of Civil Rights fiction.

Freshwater Road

Nicholas, Denise

United States

"A novel as significant as it is engrossing." —Booklist, starred review Grant Park is a page-turning and provocative look at black and white relations in contemporary America, blending the absurd and the poignant in a powerfully well-crafted narrative that showcases Pitts's gift for telling emotionally wrenching stories. Grant Park begins in 1968, with Martin Luther King's final days in Memphis. The story then moves to the eve of the 2008 election, and cuts between the two eras. Disillusioned columnist Malcolm Toussaint, fueled by yet another report of unarmed black men killed by police, hacks into his newspaper's server to post an incendiary column that had been rejected by his editors. Toussaint then disappears, and his longtime editor, Bob Carson, is summarily fired within hours of the column's publication. While a furious Carson tries to find Toussaintwhile simultaneously dealing with the reappearance of a lost love from his days as a 60s activistToussaint is abducted by two white supremacists plotting to explode a bomb at Barack Obama's planned rally in Chicago’s Grant Park. Toussaint and Carson are forced to remember the choices they made as young men, when both their lives were changed profoundly by their work in the civil rights movement.

Grant Park

Pitts Jr., Leonard

Early Sunday Morning is the first offering from Denene Millner Books, the new children’s line published under Agate’s Bolden imprint in partnership with Denene Millner, the noted parenting authority, editor, and New York Times bestselling author. Love and family. These are the things that a little girl finds most special about Sunday mornings. Early Sunday Morning follows June, Mommy, Daddy, and brother Troy through their weekend routine as June prepares for a special performance leading the children’s choir at church on Sunday morning. Readers spend the weekend with June as she collects helpful pieces of advice on how to be less nervous about her big solo. Along the way, she visits the barbershop with Mommy and Troy, gets her hair done by Mommy, receives a special dress from her aunt, and shares her family ritual of getting ready for Sunday morning service. As her special moment approaches, June leans on the support of her whole family, as well as advice from her father, to conquer her fear of singing in front of the congregation. Early Sunday Morning is a heartwarming celebration of the special time a young girl and her family share together as she learns how to lift her mighty voice.

Early Sunday Morning (Denene Millner Books)

Children's Books

Millner, Denene

The best site for thoughtful, fierce advice about parenting from a Black perspective” Ebony For almost a decade, national parenting expert and bestselling author Denene Millner has published thought-provoking, insightful, sometimes wickedly funny commentary about motherhood on her critically acclaimed website MyBrownBaby.com. The site, hailed as a must-read” by the New York Times, speaks to the experiences, joys, fears, sorrows, and triumphs of African American motherhood, from pregnancy and child-rearing to relationships and the politics of parenting black children. After publishing almost 2,000 posts aimed at lifting the voices of moms and dads of color, Millner has now curated My Brown Baby, a collection of the website’s most important and insightful essays. This one-of-a-kind parenting book offers perspectives on the issues moms of color and mothers of children of color face as they raise their kidsfrom birthing while black to negotiating discipline to preparing children for racism. Through her website, Millner has created a space for African American moms and parents of black children, many of whom long to lend their critical but all-too-often ignored voices to the national parenting discussion. Full of essays that readers of all backgrounds will find provocative, My Brown Baby acknowledges that there absolutely are issues that African American parents must deal with that white parents never have to confront if they’re not raising brown children. This book chronicles these differences with open arms, a lot of love, and the deep belief that though we may come from separate places and have different backgrounds, all parents want the same things for our families, and especially for our children.

My Brown Baby: On the Joys and Challenges of Raising African American Children (Denene Millner Books)

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Agate Bolden publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Agate Bolden