To save the home that has belonged to his family for generations, Charles Blakey, a young black man whose life is slowly crumbling around him, agrees to rent out his basement for the summer to a mysterious stranger.

White Girls, Hilton Als's first book since The Women fourteen years ago, finds one of The New Yorker's boldest cultural critics deftly weaving together his brilliant analyses of literature, art, and music with fearless insights on race, gender, and history. The result is an extraordinary, complex portrait of "white girls," as Als dubs them—an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures as diverse as Truman Capote and Louise Brooks,

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"In Reggie Ford's bold reassessment of the Black experience in America, he demonstrates that a new understanding of PTSD is required. PTSD, Perseverance Through Severe Dysfunction, as Ford defines it, underlines the darkness of mental health illnesses and behaviors that impact young Black men and have plagued Black Americans for generations. But his reassessment is not doom and gloom. Instead, Ford implores that we turn pain into peace. His uplifting...

Discusses what black males fear most, their longing for intimacy, the pitfalls of patriarchy, and the destruction of oppression through redemption and love.

"Cool" is an attitude for surviving in an unhospitable environment and in today's society is synonymous with "being a man." Conner explores street cool, revolutionary cool, middle-class cool, electronic cool, and women and cool.

After a chance encounter with an ex-NBA player with his own regrets, recent college graduate Jonah Winters, unsure of what's next, heads to Brazil where he slowly forms an understanding of self, community, and freedom that is rarely afforded to young black men.