A passionate and original new voice of the African-American literary tradition. Chris Jones has a gift for creating desire-a result of his own passionate desire to be anywhere but where he is, to be anyone but himself. Sick of the constraints of his black working-class town, he uses his knack for creating effective ad campaigns to land a dream job in London. But life soon takes a turn for the worse, and unexpectedly Chris finds himself back where he started, forced to return to Philadelphia where his only job prospect is answering phones at the electrical company and helping the poor pay their heating and lighting bills. Surrounded by his brethren, the down and out, the indigent, the hopeless, Chris hits bottom. Only a stroke of inspiration and faith can get him back on his feet. The funny and moving tale of a young black man who, in the process of trying to break free from the city he despises, is forced to come to terms with himself

Horizon Realty is bringing Harlem back to its Renaissance. With the help of Cedric, Bobby, and Horus-three ex-cons trying to forge a new life-Horizon clears out the rubble and the rabble, filling once-dilapidated brownstones with black professionals handpicked for their shared vision of Harlem as a shining icon for the race. And fate seems to be working in Horizon's favor: Harlem's undesirable tenants seem increasingly clumsy of late, meeting early deaths by accident. As an ambitious reporter, Piper Goines, begins to investigate the neighborhood's extraordinarily high accident rate, Horizon's three employees find themselves fighting for their souls and their very lives-against a backdrop of some of the most beautiful brownstones in all of Manhattan

From the author of the critically beloved Pym comes a ruthlessly comic and moving tale of a man discovering a lost daughter, confronting an elusive ghost, and stumbling onto the possibility of utopia. "In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father's house." Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and she’s been raised to think she’s white. Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he’s never known, in a haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers. A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and whites, fathers and daughters, the living and the dead, Loving Day celebrates the wonders of opposites bound in love

A comic journey into the ultimate land of whiteness by an unlikely band of African American adventurers.  Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes is obsessed with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe’s strange and only novel. When he discovers the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that seems to confirm the reality of Poe’s fiction, he resolves to seek out Tsalal, the remote island of pure and utter blackness that Poe describes with horror. Jaynes imagines it to be the last untouched bastion of the African Diaspora and the key to his personal salvation. He convenes an all-black crew of six to follow Pym’s trail to the South Pole in search of adventure, natural resources to exploit, and, for Jaynes at least, the mythical world of the novel. With little but the firsthand account from which Poe derived his seafaring tale, a bag of bones, and a stash of Little Debbie snack cakes, Jaynes embarks on an epic journey under the permafrost of Antarctica, beneath the surface of American history, and behind one of literature’s great mysteries. He finds that here, there be monsters