The Return of Arsène Lupin (1917) is a novel by Maurice Leblanc. Blending crime fiction, fantasy, and mystery, Leblanc crafts original and entertaining tales of adventure starring one of the greatest literary characters of all time—Arsène Lupin, gentleman thief. Partly based on the life of French anarchist Marius Jacob, Lupin first appeared in print in 1905 as an answer to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Arsène Lupin is the world’s greatest thief, an unmatched force for good whose exploits threaten the wealth and standing of France’s most wicked men. In this installment of Leblanc’s beloved series, Lupin uses his remarkable wit and chameleon-like ability to move undetected through aristocratic society in order to steal, trick, and cheat his way through life. Despite his criminal nature, he operates under a strict moral code, only taking from those who have taken from the poor all their lives. The Return of Arsène Lupin opens on a world without Lupin—long thought dead, he even has a gravestone bearing his name. The First World War has come and gone, leaving a generation of men and women scarred irreparably. Two unlikely friends, wounded veterans Patrice and Ya-Bon, find comfort in their shared trauma. When Patrice is implicated in the murder of an acquaintance, they must race against time in order to find the true killer. In the final hour, a ghost from the past reappears to offer his help. The Return of Arsène Lupin is a story of romance, mystery, and crime that continues to astound over a century after it was published. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Maurice Leblanc’s The Return of Arsène Lupin is a classic of French literature reimagined for modern readers.

Heart-wrenchingly honest, fans of Brandy Colbert and Nicola Yoon will anticipate this poignant reflection on what it means to choose yourself. On the day Torrey moves and officially becomes a college freshman, he gets a call that might force him to drop out before he’s even made it through orientation: the bank is foreclosing on the bee farm his Uncle Miles left him. Torrey’s worked hard to become the first member of his family to go to college, but while the neighborhood held him back emotionally, Uncle Miles encouraged him to reach his full potential. For years, it was just the two of them tending the farm. So Torrey can’t let someone erase his uncle’s legacy without a fight. He tries balancing his old life in L.A. with his new classes, new friends, and (sort of) new boyfriend in San Francisco, but as the farm heads for auction, the pressure of juggling everything threatens to tear him apart. Can he make a choice between his family and his future without sacrificing a part of himself?

Contemporary Black American Cinema offers a fresh collection of essays on African American film, media, and visual culture in the era of global multiculturalism. Integrating theory, history, and criticism, the contributing authors deftly connect interdisciplinary perspectives from American studies, cinema studies, cultural studies, political science, media studies, and Queer theory. This multidisciplinary methodology expands the discursive and interpretive registers of film analysis. From Paul Robeson's and Sidney Poitier's star vehicles to Lee Daniels's directorial forays, these essays address the career legacies of film stars, examine various iterations of Blaxploitation and animation, question the comedic politics of "fat suit" films, and celebrate the innovation of avant-garde and experimental cinema.

In this edited volume, Kasi Lemmons, the first African-American woman auteur to solidly and steadily produce a full body of work in cinema—an oeuvre of quality, of note, of international recognition—will get the full film-studies treatment. This collection offers the first scholarly examination of Lemmons’ films through various frameworks of film theory, illuminating her highly personal, unique, and rare vision. In Lemmons’ worldview, the spiritual and the supernatural manifest in the natural, corporeal world. She subtly infuses her work with such images and narratives, owning her formalism, her modernist aesthetic, her cinematic preoccupations and her ontological leanings on race. Lemmons holds the varied experiences of African-American life before her lens—the ambitious bourgeoise, the spiritually lost, the ill and discarded, and the historically erased—and commits to capturing the nuances and differentiations, rather than perpetuating essentialized portrayals. This collection delves into Lemmons’ iconoclastic drive and post-soul aesthetic as emanations of her attitudes toward personal agency, social agency, and social justice.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.