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Books by Walter Mosley
What Next:
A Memoir Toward World Peace /
Life Out of Context /
Devil in A Blue Dress /
Fear of the Dark (audiobook )
Little Scarlet (An Easy Rawlins Novel) /
Cinamon Kiss (audiobook) /
This Year You Write Your Novel /
Fortunate Son
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What Next
A Memoir Toward World Peace
By Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley's
What Next dares to
propose that African Americans can have a voice and play a
leading role in creating world peace. It challenges global
capitalism, which profits from creating wars, hunger and death
around the world. It condemns our government's corrupt political
leadership and its subservience to corporations as opposed to
the democratic will of the people. And perhaps most provocative
of all, it encourages everyday people to take action to bring
about world peace.
Shocked by the events of 9/11 (witnessed from
his New York apartment), best-selling author Mosley like many
other Americans, questioned why our enemies hate us so. Mosley's
answer did not come from the endless news coverage, but from
conversations he had as a child and as an adult with his father.
these conversations provided a background and a filter for
Mosley to explore what it means for African Americans to be
Americans, to be attacked by America's enemies, and to stand for
world peace.
Leroy Mosley, the author's father, was a hard
working provider, a deep thinker, and a contemporary urban
philosopher. Drafted into the army during the Second World War,
he quickly discovered German troops shot at him just as readily
as they did other Americans. This experience convinced Leroy
that he was indeed a full-fledged citizen of the United States.
Watching the trail of smoke rise from the damaged twin towers,
the younger Mosley was reminded of his father's journey to his
own self-styled emancipation
Reader be warned: this is not another 9/11
book. In an engaging and unique style Mosley argues, for African
Americans, with centuries of experience fighting against
slavery, racism, and oppression, the struggle for global
equality is a natural role.
Directed primarily to African Americans
embraceable by all,
What Next is a call to action for
bringing about world peace. * * * *
* Walter
Mosley Signs Deal
with Black Classic Press of
Baltimore
Best-selling author Walter Mosley has chosen
Black Classic Press, a Baltimore independent press and
publisher, to bring out his new book rather than a more
corporate publisher such as W.W. Norton. This new book will be
entitled
What Next
: An African-American Initiative Toward
World Peace. This non-fiction work, we believe, will be out
sometime early 2003.
In 1996, Mosley gave his manuscript
Gone Fishin' an unpublished work of the early years of his
fictional hero Easy Rawlins, to Black Classic Press, which sold
over 100,000 copies of this detective novel.
In this new non-fictional work, Mosley
explores black popular opinion on world peace, terrorism, and
war with Iraq. He looks at his relationship with his father, a
WW II veteran, to examine what American identity and American
patriotism means to blacks. The book will be hardcover, 124
pages. Paul Coates, publisher of Black Classic Press, plans to
print 40,000 in the first printing.
Though not a 9/11 book, Mosley, according to
Coates, was "inspired by that event." Mosley attempts
"to create a dialogue around the black community's
perspective on revenge, security, and peace." What Next
is intended as a "conversation, not a manifesto."
Gone Fishin'
is the first novel about Ezekiel "Easy"
Rawlins and Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, and
chronicles in language both earthy and lyrical their
early years in 1939 Houston and the swamp lands of
pariah, Texas. A tale of youthful naivete and adult
passions, murder, and redemption,
Gone Fishin'
reveals for the first time the forces that shaped the
adult characters enjoyed by millions in the five novels
featuring the reluctant detective and his deadly
sidekick.
This unique
collaboration, the first between a best-selling African
American author and an independent African
American-owned publisher, was stimulated by a comment
made during a PEN Open Book Committee panel moderated by
Mosley.
| "When it was suggested that once in a while successful
Black authors should publish a book with a Black publisher, I
felt it made a lot of sense," Mosley said.With the blessing of W.W. Norton, his usual publisher, Mosley
began to explore such a collaboration.
His search was rewarded
when he met Paul Coates, publisher of the Baltimore-based press.
Coates, whose press specializes in publishing long-lost treasure
of African-American literature and important work by
contemporary author, felt the novel was a perfect fit for his
publishing program and moved aggressively to acquire the book. |
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"Walter Mosley is one of our finest living American
novelists, yet this powerful novel has remained unpublished
until now. And while he has gone on to unanimous acclaim for his
Easy Rawlins detective series and other novels, i believe the
publication of Gone Fishin' will show not only the depth
of Walter's early genius but will also forge some important
links in our undertaking of the moral complexity and richness of
the characters who populate his later fiction."
Gone Fishin'
was published 1997 by Black Classic
Press. Walter Mosley is the author of fourteen critically
acclaimed books and has been translated into twenty-one languages. His
popular mysteries featuring Easy Rawlins began with
Devil in a Blue
Dress in 1990, which was translated to the notable 1995 film.
Mosley has also written three works of literary fiction, two works of
science fiction, a first volume in a new mystery series Fearless Jones,
and two works of nonfiction,
Workin' on the Chain Gang and Black
Genius. he most recently published a collection of short stories
featuring Easy Rawlins, Six Easy Pieces.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, he now lives in New York City.
posted 10 March 2003
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Walter Mosley on Writing
I didn’t start off writing
detective novels. The first thing I wrote was Gone Fishin’,
which is Easy Rawlins and Mouse, but it wasn’t a detective
novel. I sent it out, and everybody said to me, "Well, it’s good
writing, but who’s going to read this?" And I go, "What do you
mean?" Said, "Well, you know, white people don’t read about
black people. Black women don’t like black men. And black men
don’t read. So who’s going to read your book?" And so, you know,
I accepted it. A lot of people, their first book, don’t get
published.
So I went back, and I wrote
another book about Easy and Mouse, but this time it was a
mystery. And everybody was like, "Wow! That’s great! A black
detective!" One guy actually said, "But, you know, there already
is a black detective." And I said, "Well, you know, there’s a
whole bunch of white detectives." And he goes, "I don’t see what
you mean by that." But that worked.
And then it worked in ways
that I didn’t expect, because everybody reads mysteries, and
they don’t care who the detective is. They care about the
mystery itself. And then a world gets revealed throughout that.
You know, that starts with Sherlock Holmes. You know, he kind of
reveals the whole empire through those short stories. And so, I
just said, "Wow! This is really great. This is working. I’m
getting all kinds of people to read this book." And, you know,
and that’s really wonderful. . . .Well, you know, I’ve always
been really bad in school. I can’t study anything I’m not
interested in, or that I don’t—I can’t see a direct reason for
studying it. And that was always a really bad thing. I always
tell people that, you know, if you—well, if you come to, like, a
young black woman and she’s going to be a writer, she’ll
say—you’ll say, "Who influenced her?" And she’ll say, "Well,
Phillis Wheatley and Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker and
Toni Morrison and Edwidge Danticat and Zadie Smith." She’ll say
names to you that will make you put her in higher esteem. You
know, you’re going to be like Toni Morrison.
The truth is, you learn how
to read when you’re a kid. Who influenced you was Nancy Drew,
right? If you read Beloved at the age of eight, you would either
kill yourself or your mother, right? You know, I mean, you’d
say, "Mom, I read this book, and I don’t buy it. You know, so
one of us has to go." I mean, that’s what you would say. You
have to be an adult. But when you learn how to read, you’re a
child. You love literature. It’s real. You really experience it.
Your imagination is the most powerful it will ever be. You’re
closer to your unconscious than you will ever again be. So you
read these things that are not great literature, as E.M. Forster
talks about in his book about writing. But you take the things
that you love, and you make them into something.
So, like I’m really
influenced by the stories my father told about his childhood.
I’m very influenced by comic books: Jack Kirby and Stan Lee and
Marvel Comics really kind of structured my life. Later on, you
know, I read Gabriel García Márquez and Albert Camus and André
Malraux, and they influenced me. But the big thing was, you
know, the Fantastic 4 when I was a kid.— DemocracyNow
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AALBC.com's 25 Best Selling Books
Fiction
#1 -
Justify My Thug by Wahida Clark
#2 -
Flyy Girl by Omar Tyree
#3 -
Head Bangers: An APF Sexcapade by Zane
#4 -
Life Is Short But Wide by J. California Cooper
#5 -
Stackin' Paper 2 Genesis' Payback by Joy King
#6 -
Thug Lovin' (Thug 4) by Wahida Clark
#7 -
When I Get Where I'm Going by Cheryl Robinson
#8 -
Casting the First Stone by Kimberla Lawson Roby
#9 -
The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth by Zane
#10 -
Covenant: A Thriller by Brandon Massey
#11 -
Diary Of A Street Diva by Ashley and JaQuavis
#12 -
Don't Ever Tell by Brandon Massey
#13 -
For colored girls who have considered suicide by Ntozake Shange
#14 -
For the Love of Money : A Novel by Omar Tyree
#15 -
Homemade Loves by J. California Cooper
#16 -
The Future Has a Past: Stories by J. California Cooper
#17 -
Player Haters by Carl Weber
#18 -
Purple Panties: An Eroticanoir.com Anthology by Sidney Molare
#19 -
Stackin' Paper by Joy King
#20 -
Children of the Street: An Inspector Darko Dawson Mystery by
Kwei Quartey
#21 -
The Upper Room by Mary Monroe
#22 –
Thug Matrimony by Wahida Clark
#23 -
Thugs And The Women Who Love Them by Wahida Clark
#24 -
Married Men by Carl Weber
#25 -
I Dreamt I Was in Heaven - The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang by
Leonce Gaiter
Non-fiction
#1 -
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning
Marable
#2 -
Confessions of a Video Vixen by Karrine Steffans
#3 -
Dear G-Spot: Straight Talk About Sex and Love by
Zane
#4 -
Letters to a Young Brother: MANifest Your Destiny
by Hill Harper
#5 -
Peace from Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What
You're Going Through by Iyanla Vanzant
#6 -
Selected Writings and Speeches of Marcus Garvey
by Marcus Garvey
#7 -
The Ebony Cookbook: A Date with a Dish by Freda
DeKnight
#8 -
The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors by
Frances Cress Welsing
#9 -
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin
Woodson
#10 -
John Henrik Clarke and the Power of Africana History by Ahati
N. N. Toure
#11 -
Fail Up: 20 Lessons on Building Success from Failure by Tavis
Smiley
#12 -The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by
Michelle Alexander
#13 -
The Black Male Handbook: A Blueprint for Life by Kevin Powell
#14 -
The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
#15 -
Why Men Fear Marriage: The Surprising Truth Behind Why So Many Men
Can't Commit by RM Johnson
#16 -
Black Titan: A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American
Millionaire by Carol Jenkins
#17 -
Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority by Tom
Burrell
#18 -
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle
#19 -
John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism by Keith
Gilyard
#20 -
Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher by Leonard Harris
#21 -
Age Ain't Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife by
Carleen Brice
#22 -
2012 Guide to Literary Agents by Chuck Sambuchino
#23 -
Chicken Soup for the Prisoner's Soul by Tom Lagana
#24 -
101 Things Every Boy/Young Man of Color Should Know by LaMarr
Darnell Shields
#25 -
Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle
Class by Lisa B. Thompson * *
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) |
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great
Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a
sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi
for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin
was falsely accused of stealing a white
man's turkeys and was almost beaten to
death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling,
a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem
after learning of the grove owners'
plans to give him a "necktie party" (a
lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for
the United States Army and couldn't
operate in his own home town." Anchored
to these three stories is Pulitzer
Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's
magnificent, extensively researched
study of the "great migration," the
exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into
the novelistic narratives of Gladney,
Starling, and Pershing settling in new
lands, building anew, and often finding
that they have not left racism behind.
The drama, poignancy, and romance of a
classic immigrant saga pervade this
book, hold the reader in its grasp, and
resonate long after the reading is done.
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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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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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