This New York Times–bestselling novel is “lively, topical, and fantasy filled. Watch out, Terry McMillian. Cleage is on your tail” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). After a decade of elegant pleasures and luxe living with the Atlanta brothers and sisters with the best clothes and biggest dreams, Ava Johnson has temporarily returned home to Idlewild—her fabulous career and power plans smashed to bits by cold reality. But what she imagines to be the end is, instead, a beginning. Because, in the ten-plus years since Ava left, all the problems of the big city have come to roost in the sleepy North Michigan community whose ordinariness once drove her away; and she cannot turn her back on friends and family who sorely need her in the face of impending trouble and tragedy. Besides which, that one unthinkable, unmistakable thing is now happening to her: Ava Johnson is falling in love. Acclaimed playwright, essayist, New York Times–bestselling author, and columnist Pearl Cleage has created a world rich in character, human drama, and deep, compassionate understanding, in a remarkable novel that sizzles with sensuality, hums with gritty truth, and sings and crackles with life-affirming energy. “Very funny and charming . . . Following Cleage’s twists and turns of the human spirit, readers may find themselves on a very inspired and uplifted plane well before the last page.” —Washington Post Book World “Cleage . . . delivers a work of intelligence and integrity. . . . [A] memorable tale.” —-Publishers Weekly, starred review

Taking a job in Atlanta to save the family home, Regina Burns finds herself unable to forgive her new employer for ruining her wedding plans years earlier and finds herself falling for a handsome blue-eyed stranger whom her aunt predicted she would meet. Reprint.

A Study Guide for Pearl Cleage's "What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Pearl Cleage's "What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

Summoning Our Saints: The Poetry and Prose of Brenda Marie Osbey celebrates and illuminates the poetry and prose of one of the South’s and the nation’s most notable writers. A native of New Orleans and a former poet laureate of Louisiana who served magnificently in that function during the dark days after Hurricane Katrina, Osbey has summoned up a magical, beguiling, sometimes chilling and appalling portrait of the myriad chapters of New Orleans, Southern, and hemispheric history. Her dazzling narratives offer apertures into desire, death and remembrance, often through the voices of neglected and abused citizens. The essays in this collection examine Osbey’s essays and poetry collections, situating them within greater traditions of African American women’s writing, blues music, and West African religious traditions and Catholicism. The chapters are punctuated throughout with Osbey’s own reflections on her work and bring a long-needed and appreciative critical focus to a great artist, elucidating her contributions to our common cultural heritage. The book examines Osbey’s meditations on topics such as colonization, the African diaspora, the circumCaribbean, and contemporary parallels between Europe and the United States to showcase the ways in which they add valuable new insights to transnational studies.