When a boxer-turned-revolutionary kidnaps the daughter of a weapons manufacturer and threatens to publicly execute her in exchange for a lucrative ransom, Easy Rawlins is tapped by the LAPD to make a difficult border crossing to navigate an ensuing standoff.

"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in parton his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...

Thelonius "Monk" Ellison is an erudite, accomplished but seldom-read author who insists on writing obscure literary papers rather than the so-called "ghetto prose" that would make him a commercial success. He finally succumbs to temptation after seeing the Oberlin-educated author of We's Lives in da Ghetto during her appearance on a talk show, firing back with a parody called My Pafology, which he submits to his startled agent under the gangsta pseudonym...

Golf and the game of life. The protagonist is Rannulph Junah, Southern aristocrat and World War I hero. In a tournament in Savannah, he defeats two golf pros by following the teachings of his guru, Bagger Vance, a black mystic serving as his caddie. A metaphysical fable.

Best friends and freelance troublemakers Hap Collins and Leonard Pine assist an old friend in rescuing his daughter from an abusive drug dealer, and wind up enraging the Dixie Mafia.