Two very, very different takes on the ghetto novel. It probably goes without saying, but both these novels should carry warnings for omnipresent rape, violence, and drug abuse.

15) Eldorado Red by Donald Goines ( Read more... )

8. Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson ( Read more... )

I'm still not completely sure who Sister Souljah is, but I was in Barnes and Noble with my boys yesterday and saw the cover to this, and recognized the name from somewhere. I picked the book up, started reading, and fifteen pages later was still standing there reading ( Read more... )

A Soldier's Play, Charles Fuller
1982

This play won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  It's set in an Army training camp in the deep South (Louisiana) in 1944, during the Second World War, and it is, at least in one sense, a murder mystery.  Vernon Waters, a black sergeant who was responsible for a group of black enlisted men, has been found shot to ( Read more... )