Marlon James

In the stunning first novel in Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child. 

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: “He has a nose,” people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

As Tracker follows the boy’s scent–from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers–he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that’s come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that’s also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Lilith was born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they--and she--will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call the

The Book of Night Women

Meg Wolitzer

Jonathan Lethem

Dave Eggers

William Finnegan

Neil Gaiman

Anthony Doerr

Salman Rushdie

Lauren Groff

Andrew Sean Greer

Ann Patchett

Brit Bennett

Yaa Gyasi

Sergio De La Pava

Aleksandar Hemon

George Saunders

Rabih Alameddine

Jesmyn Ward

Michael Cunningham

Jennifer Egan

Louise Erdrich

Morgan Parker

Jacqueline Woodson

Steven Okazaki

Geraldine Brooks

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Scott Turow

Timothy Egan

Victor Lavalle

Moses Sumney

Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Hector Tobar

Li Yiyun

Elizabeth Strout

C.J. Anders

Brenda J. Childs

David Handler

To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman to bring together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases

Fight of the Century

From Marlon James, author of the bestselling National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the second book in the Dark Star trilogy, his African Game of Thrones. In Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Sogolon the Moon Witch proved a worthy adversary to Tracker as they clashed across a mythical African landscape in search of a mysterious boy who disappeared. In Moon Witch, Spider King, Sogolon takes center stage and gives her own account of what happened to the boy, and how she plotted and fought, triumphed and failed as she looked for him. It’s also the story of a century-long feud—seen through the eyes of a 177-year-old witch—that Sogolon had with the Aesi, chancellor to the king. It is said that Aesi works so closely with the king that together they are like the eight limbs of one spider. Aesi’s power is considerable—and deadly. It takes brains and courage to challenge him, which Sogolon does for reasons of her own. Both a brilliant narrative device—seeing the story told in Black Leopard, Red Wolf from the perspective of an adversary and a woman—as well as a fascinating battle between different versions of empire, Moon Witch, Spider King delves into Sogolon’s world as she fights to tell her own story. Part adventure tale, part chronicle of an indomitable woman who bows to no man, it is a fascinating novel that explores power, personality, and the places where they overlap.

Moon Witch, Spider King

A "thrilling, ambitious . . . intense" ("Los Angeles Times") novel that explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970s. In "A Brief History of Seven Killings," Marlon James combines masterful storytelling with his unrivaled skill at characterization and his meticulous eye for detail to forge a novel of dazzling ambition and scope. On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven unnamed gunmen stormed the singer's house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but rumors abounded regarding the assassins' fates. "A Brief History of Seven Killings" is James's fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica's history and beyond. Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters--assassins, drug dealers, journalists, and even ghosts--James brings to life the people who walked the streets of 1970s Kingston, who dominated the crack houses of 1980s New York, and who reemerged into a radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s. Brilliantly inventive, "A Brief History of Seven Killings" is an "exhilarating" ("The New York Times") epic that's been called "a tour de force" ("The Wall Street Journal").

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Final book of The Dark Star Trilogy (estimate 2023)

The Boy and the Dark Star

John Crow's Devil

“Masterfully flips the first installment on its head... James makes the mythic tantalizingly real.’” —Esquire "Even more brilliant than the first.” —Buzzfeed An Instant New York Times Bestseller From Marlon James, author of the bestselling National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the second book in the Dark Star trilogy. In Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Sogolon the Moon Witch proved a worthy adversary to Tracker as they clashed across a mythical African landscape in search of a mysterious boy who disappeared. In Moon Witch, Spider King, Sogolon takes center stage and gives her own account of what happened to the boy, and how she plotted and fought, triumphed and failed as she looked for him. It’s also the story of a century-long feud—seen through the eyes of a 177-year-old witch—that Sogolon had with the Aesi, chancellor to the king. It is said that Aesi works so closely with the king that together they are like the eight limbs of one spider. Aesi’s power is considerable—and deadly. It takes brains and courage to challenge him, which Sogolon does for reasons of her own. Both a brilliant narrative device—seeing the story told in Black Leopard, Red Wolf from the perspective of an adversary and a woman—as well as a fascinating battle between different versions of empire, Moon Witch, Spider King delves into Sogolon’s world as she fights to tell her own story. Part adventure tale, part chronicle of an indomitable woman who bows to no man, it is a fascinating novel that explores power, personality, and the places where they overlap.

Breve storia di sette omicidi

Чорний Леопард, Рудий Вовк

Czarny lampart czerwony wilk

Sonia Sanchez

Chris Abani

Amiri Baraka

Quincy Troupe

Staceyann Chin

Kwame Dawes

Willie Perdomo

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

Jacqueline Johnson

Hal Sirowitz

NY Writers Coalition

Making the Trees Shiver is an eclectic collection recreating the magic that is the annual Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival. Poetry and prose by Chris Abani, Amiri Baraka, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Staceyann Chin, Kwame Dawes, Jennifer Egan, Marlon James, Jacqueline Johnson, Willie Perdomo, Sonia Sanchez, Hal Sirowitz, and Quincy Troupe is interspersed with work by the talented next generation of writers from NY Writers Coalition's creative writing workshops. Making the Trees Shiver celebrates community writing at it's finest: expansive, authentic, and full of life. Like Fort Greene Park itself, these pages are noisy at times, chilling at others, but always full of spectacular views.

An Anthology of the First Six Years of the Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival

Making the Trees Shiver

Marlon James

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