The fascinating and turbulent black America of the 1960s emerges in these essays, through the lenses of dissent and its contradictions. Gerald L. Early revisits this volatile time in American history, when class, culture, and race ignited conflagrations of bitterness and hatred across the nation. The lives of three active and influential people are given special attention: Cecil B. Moore, advocate and agitator in the “racial tinderbox” of black Philadelphia; Muhammad Ali, promoter of a “colored” consciousness; and Sammy Davis Jr., survivor of black vaudeville and liberator of black performers. The fiercely independent Moore, who rebuffed the black political establishment because it failed to address the concerns and needs of the majority of the black populace, used the authority of the NAACP to forge a militant, populist organization at the local level. Ali, one of the most widely recognized athletes of all time, combined protest and action to become a hero for black and “colored” people throughout the world, and became a type of ambassador to the Third World. Davis mirrored America’s emancipation, confusion, and self-destructiveness, and, most important, its self-consciousness, which transcended even his remarkable accomplishments as an entertainer. As Early demonstrates, the careers and lives of Moore, Ali, and Davis illustrate and embody the ambiguity and struggle of American identity in the 1960s.

This book is divided into four sections dealing, respectively, with street violence, prizefighting, jazz, and family. Together they form an American spiritual odyssey from a beginning of violence, despair, disillusion, and alienation to a closing about family, love, and hope. What distinguishes these poems is that, though told by a black American, they are neither about race nor racial self-consciousness but rather about the common joys and dilemmas we all share as Americans. Early's poetry, universal in its voice, portrays one man's journey to an understanding of his own life and the larger collection of lives that has made his own possible.

In this intimate portrait of life with his two daughters, Early moves beyond the myths and stereotypes surrounding black fathers, black children, and black families, to take an honest, unsentimental, and textured look at raising his children with some form of "racial consciousness".

In his second book of poems, Stuart Dybek finds vitality in the same vibrant imagery that animates his celebrated works of fiction. The poems of Streets in Their Own Ink map the internal geographies of characters who inhabit severe and often savage city streets, finding there a tension that transfigures past and present, memory and fantasy, sin and sanctity, nostalgia and the need to forget. Full of music and ecstasy, they consecrate a shadowed, alternate city of dreams and retrospection that parallels a modern city of hard realities. Ever present is Dybek's signature talent for translating "extreme and fantastic events into a fabulous dailiness, as though the extraordinary were everywhere around us if only someone would tell us where to look" (Geoffrey Wolff).

A new collection of short stories by a master of the form with a common focus on the turmoils of romantic love. Operatically dramatic and intimately lyrical, grittily urban and impressionistically natural, the varied fictions in Paper Lantern all focus on the turmoil of love as only Dybek can portray it. An execution triggers the recollection of a theatrical romance; then a social worker falls for his own client; and lovers part as giddily, perhaps as hopelessly, as a kid trying to hang on to a boisterous kite. A flaming laboratory evokes a steamy midnight drive across terrain both familiar and strange, and an eerily ringing phone becomes the telltale signature of a dark betrayal. Each story is marked with contagious desire, spontaneous revelation, and, ultimately, resigned courage. As one woman whispers when she sets a notebook filled with her sketches drifting out to sea, “Someone will find you.” Some of Dybek’s characters recur in these stories, while others appear only briefly. Throughout, they—and we—are confronted with vaguely familiar scents and images, reminiscent of love but strangely disconcerting, so that we might wonder whether we are looking in a mirror or down the barrel of a gun.

“After the ragged discharge,” Dybek writes, “when the smoke has cleared, who will be left standing and who will be shattered into shards?” Paper Lantern brims with the intoxicating elixirs known to every love-struck, lovelorn heart, and it marks the magnificent return of one of America’s most important fiction writers at the height of his powers.

Following his renowned The Coast of Chicago and Childhood, story writer Stuart Dybek returns with eleven masterful and masterfully linked stories about Chicago's fabled and harrowing South Side. United, they comprise the story of Perry Katzek and his widening, endearing clan. Through these streets walk butchers, hitmen, mothers and factory workers, boys turned men and men turned to urban myth. I Sailed With Magellan solidifies Dybek's standing as one of our finest chroniclers of urban America.

In this remarkable collection of bite-size stories, Stuart Dybek, one of our most prodigious writers, explores the human appetite for rapture and for trust. With fervent intensity and sly wit, he gives each tale his signature mix of characters—some almost ghostly, others vividly real—who live in worlds tinged with surreal potential. There are crazed nuns hijacking streetcars, eerie adventures across frozen ponds, and a boy who is visited by a miniature bride and groom every night in his uncle’s doomsday compound. Whether they are about a simple transaction, a brave inquiry, a difficult negotiation, or shared bliss, the stories in Ecstatic Cahoots target the friction between our need for ecstatic self-transcendence and our passionate longing for trust between lovers, friends, family, and even strangers.

Call it micro-fiction or mini-fiction, flash fiction or short shorts. Whatever the label, the marvelous encounters here are marked by puzzlement, anguish, and conspiratorial high spirits. In this thrilling collection, Stuart Dybek has once again re-envisioned the possibilities of fiction, creating myriad human situations that fold endlessly upon each other, his crackling prose drawing out the strange, the intimate, and the mysterious elements in each.

The poems in this powerful first book have grown from the American urban experience of the last half of this century, a time of decay and diminishing possibilities; they vary from realistic vignettes of working-class Chicago neighborhoods to prose poems elegant and spare in their surrealism. At the middle of this book and at the thematic center of the collection is Dybek's remarkable reworking of the myth of Persephone, in which the American goddess learns to prefer the underworld and has fallen in love with Death.

In The Tree of Forgetfulness, writer Pam Durban, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, continues her exploration of southern history and memory. This mesmerizing and disquieting novel recovers the largely untold story of a brutal Jim Crow-era triple lynching in Aiken County, South Carolina. Through the interweaving of several characters' voices, Durban produces a complex narrative in which each section reveals a different facet of the event. The Tree of Forgetfulness resurrects a troubled past and explores the individual and collective loyalties that led a community to choose silence over justice.

Louisa Hilliard, the last descendant of one of Charleston''s oldest families, finds her quiet life turned upside down when she comes upon the diary of one of her ancestors, which recounts the story of Diana, a 19th Century slave who worked for the Hilliards. As Louisa learns of Diana's tragic fate, she begins to sense a presence roaming in her house. Attempting to appease this presence and set right age-old wrongs, she discovers how her own life is entangled in her family's haunted history.