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Books by Jill Nelson
Let's Get It On: A Novel /
Finding Martha's Vineyard: African Americans
at Home on an Island
Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience
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Straight, No Chaser: How I Became a Grown-Up
Black Woman
Police Brutality: An Anthology
/
Sexual
Healing
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SEXUAL
HEALING
(the debut novel )
by
Jill Nelson
Reviews
With
SEXUAL
HEALING (Agate, June 2003; $23.95) Jill Nelson, author of
the best-selling Volunteer Slavery and Straight, No
Chaser, has written an outrageous new novel that’s as sexy
and compelling as it is smart, sharply observed, and scorchingly
funny. The result gives full rein to a voice that Terry McMillan
described as “boisterous, honest, and hilarious,” in a pop
page-turner that will have everyone talking about how Nelson’s
heroines turn the world’s oldest profession on its head.
Lydia
Beaucoup and Acey Allen are two childhood friends who’ve grown
up to become successful mid-career professionals. But having
reached 40, their career success is matched by their romantic
and sexual dissatisfactions. Sharing their frustrations over a
bottle of champagne, they hatch a plan: why not develop a new
business aimed at meeting the intimate needs of black women, in
an environment that’s discreet, safe, and most important of
all, completely focused on their needs, wants, and pleasures?
Thus is born the idea for A Sister’s Spa—a
“full-service” facility that supplies handsome black men
willing and able to fulfill their clientele’s every desire.
Launching the enterprise is a struggle, but the conflict is just
beginning: even as their delighted customer base grows, they
face attacks from grandstanding church and community leaders,
hostile media, malevolent business moguls, and other conniving
parties.
From
the most dignified black church in Oakland to sex-positive
small-town Nevada, from the racks of Loehmann’s to the
skyscraping executive suites of San Francisco, Sexual Healing
is a comedy of outraged manners for the 21st century,
a penetrating examination of sexual and racial politics, and a
hilariously frank and forthright exploration of what women
really want. Jill Nelson unleashes the storytelling abandon that
captivated readers of the award-winning Volunteer Slavery and
gives it full rein in what’s sure to be one of the hottest
books of this or any season.
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Sexual
Healing is a wild, sexy ride, in which two inventive and
hilarious sisters figure out a way to bring water into their
sexual desert—and yours, too. It’s a fearless look at what
women want, and a fresh take on how they can get it. If you enter
these pages lonely and wistful, you'll emerge refreshed and
invigorated, in body, mind, and soul.
--E.
Lynn Harris, A Love of My Own and Any Way the Wind
Blows
This
is the novel her fans have been hoping Jill Nelson would have
nerve enough to write!
Sexual
Healing is smart and sexy,
funny and fabulous, jazzy and justified! Sister Jill isn't just
a foot soldier in what passes for war between the sexes. She's
our commander-in-chief and follow we must.
--Pearl
Cleage, What Looks Like Crazy On An Ordinary Day and I
Wish I Had A Red Dress
In
Sexual Healing, Jill Nelson brings her formidable wit to
fiction. She pulls the covers off of American sex, demolishing
hypocrisy and double standards with a pen wielded like a
stiletto, drawing blood on every page.
--Ishmael
Reed, Another Day at the Front and From
Totems to Hip-Hop
In
a comic novel that is as insightful as it is irreverent, Jill
Nelson takes a bold look at sexual mores and gender
politics that will leave readers howling with laughter. Women
have been waiting for this one!
--Valerie
Wilson Wesley, Always True To You In My Fashion and Ain’t
Nobody’s Business If I Do
Call
it ‘Black Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough.’ In
her stellar
Sexual
Healing, Jill Nelson shows the sexual revolution isn't
over—it's just beginning.
--Farai
Chideya, Don’t Believe the Hype and The
Color of Our Future
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Reviews
of
Volunteer Slavery
Nelson's
voice is boisterous, honest and hilarious.
--Terry
McMillan
A
scalding, candid, mordantly funny book…No one, black or white,
man or woman, who has chafed at the quotidian affronts of the
modern-day workplace will fail to see themselves in this highly
personal account of a bad trip.—Boston
Globe
The
same brutal honesty that allows [Nelson] to figuratively strip
herself naked also makes her credible…Nelson has explored one
woman's corporate hell in a way that is sometimes funny and
often sad and that reveals and explores a great deal of pain
that is not hers alone.—Ellis
Cose, Newsweek
Angry
yet often very funny…may get attention because of its searing
attack on the Washington Post, but…it is, above all,
about identity and being black…[and] it is just plain
hilarious.—New
York Times Book Review
Irresistible,
I couldn't put the book down…Nelson [writes with] the sardonic
wit and wistfulness of Terry McMillan…[bringing] to life the
experience of a smart black woman in the obdurately white world
of the media.—Cynthia
Crossen, Vogue
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Reviews of
Straight No Chaser
Combines
autobiography, political analysis and self-help to discuss
unapologetically and courageously what ails the African-American
community at the turn of the new century.
--Beverly
Guy-Sheftall, New York Times
Book Review
Nelson,
at her best…melding together autobiography, political belief
and hard-hitting, in-your-face writing that says in no uncertain
terms: Here's my truth; deal with it.
--Lise
Funderburg, Newsday
A
primer for black women, written with candor, courage and wicked
wit.…Fans of Nelson's blunt, no-hold's-barred style won't be
disappointed…. This is Full Nelson—a fearless opinionator who
has something to say about virtually everything. Nelson has
succeeded in creating an impassioned call to action for black
women.—Valerie
Boyd
Argues
convincingly that black women need to raise a collective howl of
rage.—--Jill
Smolowe, Time
A
diatribe, a love song, a wake-up call, an ode, a wail, a funkified
slice of scholarship that teaches not the accepted lessons, but
the necessary ones. Everyone should read this book.
—Patricia
Smith, Boston Globe Agate
Publishers 1501 Madison St. Evanston, IL 60202
(847) 363-1830 *
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Jill Nelson
was born and raised in Harlem and has been a working journalist
for over twenty years. She is a graduate of the City College of
New York and the Columbia School of Journalism. Her work has
appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times,
Essence, The Washington Post, The Nation, Ms., The Chicago
Tribune and the Village Voice. Jill was a staff writer for the
Washington Post Magazine during its first years of existence,
and was named Washington D.C. Journalist of the Year for her
work there. She freelances and lectures widely, and writes a
twice-monthly column, “On the Verge,” for NiaOnline.com and is a
monthly contributor to the Op Ed page of USA Today.
She was a professor of
Journalism at the City College of New York from 1998 to 2003.
Jill wrote the best-selling memoir,
Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience (Noble
Press, hardcover, 1993 and Penguin, paperback, 1994) which won
an American Book Award. |
She is the author of
Straight, No Chaser: How I Became a Grown-Up Black Woman
(Putnam, Fall 1997, Penguin, Winter 1999) and edited
Police Brutality: An Anthology, for WW Norton, published
in April 2000. Her first novel, /
Sexual
Healing, was released in June 2003. Her latest book, the
non-fiction
Finding Martha's Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an
Island was published in May 2005 by Random House. The
mother of an adult daughter, and a grandmother, she lives in
Harlem.
Jill Nelson Bio
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and
the Education of a President
By
Ron Suskind
A new
book offering an insider's account of the
White House's response to the financial
crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim
Geithner ignored an order from President
Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of
major banks. According to Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the
incident is just one of several in which
Obama struggled with a divided group of
advisers, some of whom he didn't initially
consider for their high-profile roles.
Suskind interviewed more than 200 people,
including Obama, Geithner and other top
officials . . . The book states Geithner and
the Treasury Department ignored a March 2009
order to consider dissolving banking giant
Citigroup while continuing stress tests on
banks, which were burdened with toxic
mortgage assets. . . .Suskind states that
Obama accepts the blame for mismanagement in
his administration while noting that
restructuring the financial system was
complicated and could have resulted in
deeper financial harm. . . . In a February
2011 interview with Suskind, Obama
acknowledges another ongoing criticism—that
he is too focused on policy and not on
telling a larger story, one the public could
relate to. Obama is quoted as saying he was
elected in part because "he had connected
our current predicaments with the broader
arc of American history," but that such a
"narrative thread" had been lost.—Gopusa
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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