AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A New York Times Notable Book of the Year WINNER of the NBCC John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The New York Times Book Review, O Magazine, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Shondaland, Boston Globe, and many more! "So delicious that it feels illicit . . . Raven Leilani’s first novel reads like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or melt into a languorous drip; plot suddenly, wildly flying forward like a bike down a hill." —Jazmine Hughes, The New York Times Book Review No one wants what no one wants. And how do we even know what we want? How do we know we’re ready to take it? Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties—sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage—with rules. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren’t hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into Eric’s home—though not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows. Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Raven Leilani’s Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life—her hunger, her anger—in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way. “An irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that’s blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy.” —Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine

The Lustre of Our Country demonstrates how the idea of religious freedom is central to the American experience and to American influence on religion around the world.

La primera mitad de los años 90 fue un período suficiente para estremecer y voltear el pensamiento de los cubanos entonces aún incrédulos. Nunca pesó tanto la carga de una aberrante imposición. El pensamiento del autor alimentado por sus vivencias de entonces encontró en formas poéticas tan familiares como la redondilla, el soneto, la décima, el verso libre y en un relato corto la única fuente de sosiego...el "clavo caliente" al cual asirse. En ellos se desliza la denuncia social, la sátira que no deja escapar un leve humor, ese escudo inseparable del cubano. Muy oscuros aquellos años... ¿acaso únicos?... ¿concluyó ese lustro?

A collection of 48 raw and explosive poems that draw from the themes of violence, queerness, memory and hope. It puts gender in a witness box, asks it to explain where its hands have been. It prods violence with questions about its omnipresence and its celebration. It spells queerness with an arresting alphabet. The poems attempt to carve words from a place of memory and also a place of anticipation, it’s not simply a recollection, but also hope as a metaphor “What they do not tell you, about kissing a girl is even when you like it - your eyes will always stay open on the lookout for fire, but there might be lipstick and hers might wear on yours like a swatch Make a colour you can’t name, and when you get home your mother might say this shade; This shade makes you glow.” From “Of Lipsticks and Labels”