For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow Is Enuf: A Choreopoem

Author: Ntozake Shange

Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 64pp.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Trade
Pub. Date: August 1997

From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange's words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth century. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

Not a Day Goes By

Author:  E. Lynn Harris
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Publisher:  Doubleday & Company, Incorporated
Date Published:  June 2000
Format:  Trade Cloth

Welcome to the irresistible world of E. Lynn Harris--

He is a devilish and handsome ex-football player, now a rising sports agent at one of the hottest firms in the country. Irrepressible and dangerously alluring, John "Basil" Henderson has a history with women (and a few men). He's a commitment-phobe gadfly who's known for a double-edged magnetism that has the ability to thrill-- and wound.

She is the uncompromising Yancey Harrington Braxton, an up-and-coming Broadway star who oozes charm and bleeds ambition. Young, beautiful and dangerously crafty, Yancey is prepared to do whatever she must to get what she wants. A femme fatale who has left more than a few broken--hearted men in her wake, Yancey is intrigued by Basil. Both believe that in each other they've finally met their match.

A lavish wedding is planned, and the ultimate power couple plans to spend their lives in holy matrimony. But just before the nuptials, fate, and a little comeuppance from the past threaten the happy couple's future.

Masterful storyteller E. Lynn Harris takes listeners on a delicious little ride into the mischievous lives of two very unforgettable characters in this fun and satisfying cautionary tale.

Satin Doll
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Author: Karen E. Quinones
Format: Paperback, 279pp.
Publisher: Oshun Publishing Company Inc.
Pub. Date: November 1999

Set in Harlem and Philadelphia, Satin Doll tells the story of a woman living in two worlds, and feeling comfortable in neither. The lovely Regina sips cocktails in Greenwich Village with the literary elite one night, and goes barhopping with her Harlem homegirls the next. There’s Yvonne, who discovers the lawyer she is dating is married, but decides to steal him away from his wife. Tamika, who finds out the prison inmate she’s been loyal to for three years has married a white woman while behind bars. And Puddin’, a cocaine sniffing good-time girl who will snatch off her wig to fight at the drop of a hat.

Title:  She

Author: Saul Stacey Williams
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ALL TIME AALBC BEST SELLING BOOK since December 1997 when we sold our first book (out of almost over 1,000 different titles sold)!  There are indications the publisher is out of stock of this book

Publisher:  Simon and Schuster Inc.
Date Published:  June 1999
Format:  Paperback And CD - $9.60 (plus shipping and tax)

"Who says poetry does not sell?" -- Troy Johnson AALBC.com

AALBC top 10 bestseller every month this year!  She is a fascinating and unique collection of interconnected poems by this multi-talented star -- and marks the beginning of an incredible and totally original artistic career.

She is a fascinating and unique collection of interconnected poems by this multi-talented star -- and marks the beginning of an incredible and totally original artistic career.

Title:  The Seventh Octave: The Early Writings of Saul Stacey Williams
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Author:  Saul Stacey Williams, Jessica C. Moore (Editor)
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Publisher:  Moore Black Press
Date Published:  February 1998
Format:  Trade Paper

Hailed as "a dreadlocked dervish of words...the Bob Marley of American poets" (Esquire), Saul Williams is a gifted young poet who is opening up this literary art form to a new generation of readers. Like his writing -- a fearless mix of connecting rhythms and vibrant images -- Saul Williams is unstoppable. He received raves for his performance as an imprisoned street poet in the Trimark Pictures release Slam, winner of the Camera d'Or at Cannes and the Grand Jury prize at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. The consummate spoken-word performance artist, Williams has also been signed by producer Rick Rubin to record a CD of his poetry.

 
Title: Fertile Ground
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Edited by Kalamu ya Salaam & Kysha N. Brown
Publisher:  Runagate Press
Date Published:  June 1996
Format:  Trade Paper

Fertile Ground is an unbelievable package of diverse work. We have new science fiction from Amiri Baraka, Kalamu ya Salaam and Kiini Ibura Salaam. We also have manuscript excerpts from books which are now published: Haki Madhubuti presents two exquisitely crafted "love/marriage poems" from HeartLove, and Sonia Sanchez gives us a section from Does Your House Have Lions. There is also an excerpt from a work in progress by master poet Kamau Braithwaite (the 1994 winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature). Kamau tackles the thorny issue of genocide in Rwanda. There's also a major excerpt from an innovative work about cultural memory from Tobago-born, Canadian resident M. Nourbese Philip. Educator, lawyer, and former Black Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver is writing her memoirs; we have "The Summer of Love," the chapter which describes Eldridge Cleaver's courtship of her. Educator, musicologist and theologist Jon E. Spencer, author of Blues And Evil, presents a provocative view of blues as an alternative theology to Christianity. The Atlanta Committee for Black Liberation, a collective of cultural activists, documents an insightful critique of the "Million Man March." Writer and award winning anthologist (In Search Of Color Everywhere) E. Ethelbert Miller offers a tribute poem to Langston Hughes.

Clifford's Blues  
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Author: John A. Williams

Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 309pp.
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Pub. Date: April 1999

In his newest of twelve novels, John A. Williams presents the story of a black, gay jazz musician imprisoned in Dachau who manages to survive by working as the band leader of a group of prisoners who play at a nearby club for SS officers. If there is an undiscovered aspect of the black experience, it will be found by Williams.

!Click Song

Author: John A. Williams

Format: Paperback, 430pp.
Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press
Pub. Date: November  1989 (Out of print)

Limited, autographed, copies available directly from AALBC.com - 430 pages paperback $20.00

"The 'private and public' vicissitudes of a black novelist trying to establish himself as a writer of distinction are chronicled in this revealing tale of the New York cultural scene from World War II to the present--told with directness of language and feeling" ~ NY Times

"In my native village...there is a song we always sing...it's called the click song by the English because they cannot say !CLICK !CLOCK !CWLUNG"
~ Miriam Makeba

Conspiracy (Arabesque)
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Author:  Margie Walker

Format: Mass Market Paperback, 352pp.
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corporation
Pub. Date: March 1997