A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK!
Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison powerfully examines our obsession with beauty and conformity—and asks questions about race, class, and gender with her characteristic subtly and grace.
In Morrison’s bestselling first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times).
“So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.” —The New York Times
“A profoundly successful work of fiction. . . . Taut and understated, harsh in its detachment, sympathetic in its truth . . . it is an experience.” —The Detroit Free Press
“This story commands attention, for it contains one black girl’s universe.” —Newsweek
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick
“Bennett’s tone and style recalls James Baldwin and Jacqueline Woodson, but it’s especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye.” —Kiley Reid, Wall Street Journal
“A story of absolute, universal timelessness …For any era, it's an accomplished, affecting novel. For this moment, it's piercing, subtly wending its way toward questions about who we are and who we want to be….” – Entertainment Weekly
From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?The Journey Prize Stories is Canada’s most celebrated annual fiction anthology. With settings ranging from Mount St. Helens, Barcelona, Halifax, Victoria Island, and Alberta’s Red River Badlands, these stories represent the year’s best short fiction by some of our most exciting emerging writers.
Among the stories this year: After months of trying to sell the worthless collection of sports cards his no-good father left behind, a boy is unprepared for a bizarre and surprisingly hilarious encounter with the “pile of human being” who wants to buy a card to complete his collection. In a story that balances wry humour with moments of sharp tension, a teenager with a crush on her high school English teacher blithely channels her frustrations by going on online dates with an older man. Two brothers embark on a road trip to bring their recovering father home from the hospital, in a poignant mediation on family and the things we try to recover of the past. Over the course of a single summer in 1970s Halifax, as shifting social mores lead to a crisis within his family, a boy obsessed with comic books begins to question his once unshakable faith in his uncle.
Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle one of the most critical topics in our work and personal lives: how to make better decisions.
Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We’re overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn’t. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn’t fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better?
In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively readable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star’s ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO’s disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions.
Along the way, we learn the answers to critical questions like these: How can we stop the cycle of agonizing over our decisions? How can we make group decisions without destructive politics? And how can we ensure that we don’t overlook precious opportunities to change our course?
Decisive is the Heath brothers’ most powerful—and important—book yet, offering fresh strategies and practical tools enabling us to make better choices. Because the right decision, at the right moment, can make all the difference.
In this honest and stunning novel, now a major motion picture directed by Barry Jenkins, James Baldwin has given America a moving story of love in the face of injustice.
Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin’s story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions–affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.
"One of the best books Baldwin has ever written–perhaps the best of all." –The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless.”–Joyce Carol Oates
"If Van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our twentiethth-century one." –Michael Ondaatje
"Striking and particularly haunting. . . . A beauty, especially in its rendering of youthful passion." –Cosmopolitan
"A major work of black American fiction... His best novel yet, even Baldwin's most devoted readers are due to be stunned by it."–The New Republic
"Emotional dynamite... a powerful assault upon the cynicism that seems today to drain our determination to confront deep social problems."–Library Journal
"A moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless."
–The New York Times Book Review
“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.
With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
Are you learning English as a second language?
English for Everyone: Level 3: Intermediate, Practice Book makes learning English easier. More than 700 exercises use graphics and visuals to develop English skills in speaking and pronunciation, reading, writing, vocabulary, and grammar.
Exercises may include finding the errors in sample text messages, reading comprehension questions, fill-in-the-blanks, word order games, and listening questions.
English for Everyone: Level 3: Intermediate, Practice Book covers the skills and topics needed for the major global English-language exams, including TOEFL, and uses the same testing methods so you can practice your skills and measure your success.
Use this practice book with English for Everyone: Level 3: Intermediate, Course Book so you can work with the books together. And, download the free app and practice online with free listening exercises at www.dkefe.com.
Series Overview: English for Everyone series teaches all levels of English, from beginner to advanced, to speakers of English as a second language. Innovative visual learning methods introduce key language skills, grammar, and vocabulary, which are reinforced with a variety of speaking, reading, and writing exercises to make the English language easier to understand and learn. Visit www.dkefe.com to find out more.