In Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller shows how African migrants and their political fraternities played a formative role in the history of Cuba. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no large kingdoms controlled Nigeria and Cameroon's multilingual Cross River basin. Instead, each settlement had its own lodge of the initiation society called Ékpè, or “leopard,” which was the highest indigenous authority. Ékpè lodges ruled local communities while also managing regional and long-distance trade. Cross River Africans, enslaved and forcibly brought to colonial Cuba, reorganized their Ékpè clubs covertly in Havana and Matanzas into a mutual-aid society called Abakuá, which became foundational to Cuba's urban life and music. Miller's extensive fieldwork in Cuba and West Africa documents ritual languages and practices that survived the Middle Passage and evolved into a unifying charter for transplanted slaves and their successors. To gain deeper understanding of the material, Miller underwent Ékpè initiation rites in Nigeria after ten years' collaboration with Abakuá initiates in Cuba and the United States. He argues that Cuban music, art, and even politics rely on complexities of these African-inspired codes of conduct and leadership. Voice of the Leopard is an unprecedented tracing of an African title-society to its Caribbean incarnation, which has deeply influenced Cuba's creative energy and popular consciousness.

One of TIME’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time Winner of the L.A. Times Ray Bradbury Prize Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award The New York Times Bestseller Named a Best Book of 2019 by The Wall Street Journal, TIME, NPR, GQ, Vogue, and The Washington Post "A fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made." --Neil Gaiman "Gripping, action-packed....The literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The epic novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings In the stunning first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child. Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard. As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying? Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.

Human emotion and animal instinct meet poignantly when two six-week-old leopard cubs become the charge of 22-year-old game ranger Graham Cooke at Londolozi. Staying with the cubs in an unfenced bush camp surrounded by lions, hyenas and other leopards, he must first gain their trust before he begins to guide them towards release in the wild. It takes weeks of patience and gentleness for Graham to be accepted into the cubs' small family unit and to find ways of communicating with the young leopards as he slowly begins to introduce them to their new environment. Graham finds himself drawn more to the wary little female than her easy-going brother, but over time both cubs come to recognise him as their protector. They form a bond of friendship through which he can gain unparalleled insights into their development and behaviour. When, a year later, the cubs are relocated to the Zambian wilderness, Graham faces the hardest task of all: to set free the young animals he has become so devoted to so that they can return to a wild existence where he is unable to control their fate.

In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. In the early 1800s in Cuba, enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon created Abakuá societies for protection and mutual aid. Abakuá rites reenact mythic legends of the institution’s history in Africa, using dance, chants, drumming, symbolic writing, herbs, domestic animals, and masked performers to represent African ancestors. Criminalized and scorned in the colonial era, Abakuá members were at the same time contributing to the creation of a unique Cuban culture, including rumba music, now considered a national treasure. Translated for the first time into English, Cabrera’s lexicon documents phrases vital to the creation of a specific African-derived identity in Cuba and presents the first “insider’s” view of this African heritage. This text presents thoroughly researched commentaries that link hundreds of entries to the context of mythic rites, skilled ritual performance, and the influence of Abakuá in Cuban society and popular music. Generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, the volume includes a new introduction to Cabrera’s writing as well as appendices that situate this important work in Cuba’s history. With the help of living Abakuá specialists in Cuba and the US, Ivor L. Miller and P. González Gómes-Cásseres have translated Cabrera’s Spanish into English for the first time while keeping her meanings and cultivated style intact, opening this seminal work to new audiences and propelling its legacy in African diaspora studies.

SOON TO BE A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES • “A majestic, melancholy, and beautiful novel” (The New Yorker), THE LEOPARD is one of the best-selling Italian novels of the twentieth century and an acclaimed masterpiece of world literature. This beautiful hardcover edition, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, also includes two short stories and a brief memoir of the author’s childhood. Set in Sicily in the 1860s, during the tumult of Italian unification, THE LEOPARD tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, fading aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of revolution and democracy. Its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who was the last in a line of Sicilian princes, wrote the novel in the 1950s, inspired by the decline of his own family. Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, remains skeptical and stoic as he finds himself beset by civil war, social change, and his family’s loss of wealth and status. While his beloved nephew, Tancredi, more practical and flexible than he, joins the nationalist rebels and marries the ambitious daughter of a newly rich upstart, Don Fabrizio takes refuge in his love of astronomy, gazing at the unchanging stars while the world as he has known it crumbles around him. The dramatic sweep and richness of Lampedusa’s observation, his seamless intertwining of public and private worlds, and his sure grasp of human frailty imbue THE LEOPARD with its melancholy beauty and power. “No novel in Italian literature has aroused so much passion or caused so much argument… The book is more than the memorable invocation of a certain place in a certain epoch. It is a work of art that will survive, long after the last sad palaces of Palermo have gone, because it deals with the central problems of the human experience.” —from the Introduction by David Gilmour "The genius of its author and the thrill it gives the reader are probably for all time."—The New York Times Book Review "A masterwork . . . A superb novel in the great tradition and the grand manner."—Newsweek Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

A Teaching Memoir That Crosses the Barriers Between Worlds A shaman is one who has learned to move between two worlds: our physical reality and the realm of spirits. For John Lockley, shamanic training also meant learning to cross the immense divide of race and culture in South Africa. As a medic drafted into the South African military in 1990, John Lockley had a powerful dream. "Even though I am a white man of Irish and English descent, I knew in my bones that I had received my calling to become a sangoma, a traditional South African shaman," John writes. "I felt blessed by the ancient spirit of Africa, and I knew that I had started on a journey filled with magic and danger." His path took him from the hills of South Korea, where he trained as a student under Zen Master Su Bong, to the rural African landscape of the Eastern Cape and the world of the sangoma mystic healers, where he found his teacher in the medicine woman called MaMngwevu. In Leopard Warrior, John shares a gripping account of his experiences and the wisdom he learned over years of training. Here he invites you to discover: • Powerful insights into the spiritual tradition of the Xhosa lineage of South Africa—the tribe of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu • Ubuntu—a core concept for recognizing and embracing our deep interconnection with all living things • Ancestor medicine—how we can learn to honor the blood in our veins, the heritage of our soul, and our shared humanity • Recovering our forgotten knowledge about the wisdom of our dreams, the spirits of plants and animals, and the power of the unseen world In traditional African healing circles, the leopard represents intuition, instinct, and harmony with nature and the spirit world. As John Lockley writes, "A leopard warrior is a spiritual soldier who mirrors the natural world and directs their gaze inward to answer the call of their spirit." With Leopard Warrior, he brings us an inspiring call to action—showing how we can bridge the barriers that divide us, embrace the gifts of our ancestors, and reclaim our rightful place as compassionate caretakers of our world.