Minna wishes for many things. She wishes she understood the quote taped above her mother's typewriter:Fact and fiction are different truths. She wishes her mother would stop writing long enough to really listen to her. She wishes her house were peaceful and orderly like her friend Lucas's. Most of all, she wishes she could find a vibrato on her cello and play Mozart the way he deserves to be played. Minna soon discovers that some things can't be found-they just have to happen. And as she waits for her vibrato to happen, Minna begins to understand some facts and fictions about herself.

In Sensuous Knowledge, Minna Salami draws on Africa-centric, feminist-first and artistic traditions to help us rediscover inclusive and invigorating ways of experiencing the world afresh. Combining the playfulness of a storyteller with the insight of a social critic, the book pries apart the systems of power and privilege that have dominated ways of thinking for centuries – and which have led to so much division, prejudice and damage. And it puts forward a new, sensuous, approach to knowledge: one grounded in a host of global perspectives – from Black Feminism to personal narrative, pop culture to high art, Western philosophy to African mythology – together comprising a vision of hope for a fragmented world riven by crisis. Through the prism of this new knowledge, Salami offers fresh insights into the key cultural issues that affect women’s lives. How are we to view Sisterhood, Motherhood or even Womanhood itself? What is Power and why do we conceive of Beauty? How does one achieve Liberation? She asks women to break free of the prison made by ingrained male-centric biases, and build a house themselves – a home that can nurture us all. Sensuous Knowledge confirms Minna Salami as one the most important spokespeople of today, and the arrival of a blistering new literary voice.

Book Delisted

In this charming historical novel, acclaimed artist Lauren A. Mills reimagines her beloved picture book, The Rag Coat, with fifty delicate pencil illustrations and an expanded story about a resilient little girl, her patchwork coat, and how the two bring a community together. Minna and her family don't have much in their small Appalachian cabin, but "people only need people," Papa always reminds her. Unable to afford a winter coat to wear to school, she's forced to use an old feed sack to keep her warm. Then Papa's terrible cough from working in the coal mines takes him away forever, and Minna has a hard time believing that anything will be right again...until her neighbors work tirelessly to create a coat for her out of old fabric scraps. Now Minna must show her teasing classmates that her coat is more than just rags--it's a collection of their own cherished memories, each with a story to share.

In this intriguing book, Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. In Minna's case, white people fought over who would pay for the costs of caring for a dependent, apparently enslaved, woman. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debate—about care as a "mere voluntary courtesy"—became routine in a wide range of subsequent cases about "good Samaritans." Using Minna's case as a springboard, Hartog explores the statutes, situations, and conflicts that helped produce a regime where slavery was usually but not always legal and where a supposedly enslaved person may or may not have been legally free. In exploring this liminal and unsettled legal space, Hartog sheds light on the relationships between moral and legal reasoning and a legal landscape that challenges simplistic notions of what it meant to live in freedom. What emerges is a provocative portrait of a distant legal order that, in its contradictions and moral dilemmas, bears an ironic resemblance to our own legal world.