Alamosa Public Library

"Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been 'critically acclaimed.' He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited 'some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days.' Meanwhile, Monk struggles...

"In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s." "A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused...

Easy Rawlins is out of the investigation business and as far away from crime as a black man can be in 1960s Los Angeles. But living around desperate men means life gets complicated sometimes. When an old friend gets in enough trouble to ask for Easy's help, he finds he can't refuse.

"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 part on 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...

A novel exploring the early years of Easy Rawlins and Mouse Alexander, protagonists in a current black PI series. The setting is Texas, the time the 1930s, and the two embark on a car ride which will engulf them in the bayou world of voodoo, sex and murder.

Easy Rawlins comes home to find that a friend has left his daughter at Easy's house without so much as a note. Easy's closest friend, the man known as Mouse, has disappeared too. Mouse's wife tells Easy that he is wanted for murder. Worst of all, Easy's longtime lover tells him that she plans to marry another man.

Coleman Silk, a distinguished professor at a small New England college where he has managed over the course of fifty years to make a lot of enemies, experiences a sort of personal liberation when he is forced from his job on false claims of racism -- a charge made all the more ironic due to a secret Silk has been keeping nearly his entire life.

In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J'Ouvert can't...

Black PI Easy Rawlins, working as a school janitor in Los Angeles, is seduced by a teacher into taking her dog which her husband threatens to kill. When the husband is murdered, Rawlins becomes the prime suspect and must clear his name. By the author of Black Betty.

Facing unprecedented financial troubles when his daughter requires a medical treatment, Easy Rawlins takes a job tracking down a missing attorney and legal assistant, but the assignment proves more complicated than anticipated.