NATIONAL BESTSELLER • READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY • A spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy. “A rhapsodic hymn to Black women.”—The New York Times Book Review “I fell in love with this family, from Joan’s fierce heart to her grandmother Hazel’s determined resilience. Tara Stringfellow will be an author to watch for years to come.”—Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author of Red at the Bone LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, NPR, BuzzFeed, Glamour, PopSugar Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected. As she grows up, Joan finds relief in her artwork, painting portraits of the community in Memphis. One of her subjects is their enigmatic neighbor Miss Dawn, who claims to know something about curses, and whose stories about the past help Joan see how her passion, imagination, and relentless hope are, in fact, the continuation of a long matrilineal tradition. Joan begins to understand that her mother, her mother’s mother, and the mothers before them persevered, made impossible choices, and put their dreams on hold so that her life would not have to be defined by loss and anger—that the sole instrument she needs for healing is her paintbrush. Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time, Memphis paints an indelible portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country: brutality and justice, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice and love.

Gordon's critically acclaimed and richly entertaining exploration of the birthplace of rock and roll is peopled with Delta bluesmen, manic deejays, matinee cowboys and Elvis.

An unprecedented account of one of the bloodiest and most significant racial clashes in American history In May 1866, just a year after the Civil War ended, Memphis erupted in a three-day spasm of racial violence that saw whites rampage through the city's black neighborhoods. By the time the fires consuming black churches and schools were put out, forty-six freed slaves had been murdered. Congress, furious at this and other evidence of white resistance in the conquered South, launched what is now called Radical Reconstruction, policies to ensure the freedom of the region's four million blacks-and one of the most remarkable experiments in American history. Stephen V. Ash's A Massacre in Memphis is a portrait of a Southern city that opens an entirely new view onto the Civil War, slavery, and its aftermath. A momentous national event, the riot is also remarkable for being "one of the best-documented episodes of the American nineteenth century." Yet Ash is the first to mine the sources available to full effect. Bringing postwar Memphis, Tennessee to vivid life, he takes us among newly arrived Yankees, former Rebels, boisterous Irish immigrants, and striving freed people, and shows how Americans of the period worked, prayed, expressed their politics, and imagined the future. And how they died: Ash's harrowing and profoundly moving present-tense narration of the riot has the immediacy of the best journalism. Told with nuance, grace, and a quiet moral passion, A Massacre in Memphis is Civil War-era history like no other.

Memphis gave birth to music that changed the world — Memphis Mayhem is a fascinating history of how music and culture collided to change the state of music forever “David Less has captured the essence of the Memphis music experience on these pages in no uncertain terms. There's truly no place like Memphis and this is the story of why that is. HAVE MERCY!” — Billy F Gibbons, ZZ Top Memphis Mayhem weaves the tale of the racial collision that led to a cultural, sociological, and musical revolution. David Less constructs a fascinating narrative of the city that has produced a startling array of talent, including Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Al Green, Otis Redding, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Justin Timberlake, and so many more. Beginning with the 1870s yellow fever epidemics that created racial imbalance as wealthy whites fled the city, David Less moves from W.C. Handy’s codification of blues in 1909 to the mid-century advent of interracial musical acts like Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the birth of punk, and finally to the growth of a music tourism industry. Memphis Mayhem explores the city’s entire musical ecosystem, which includes studios, high school band instructors, clubs, record companies, family bands, pressing plants, instrument factories, and retail record outlets. Lively and comprehensive, this is a provocative story of finding common ground through music and creating a sound that would change the world.

My life has never been easy. Raised by a single mother only to have her die when I was eight. Leaving me alone, being passed from foster home to foster home filled with abuse until one day I found myself homeless. Thankfully, a friend I didn't realize I had was there. He rescued me from the streets. But my life was not meant to be easy and a hidden danger made its presence known. Unknown to me I had a stalker who would do anything in his power to make me his. When his first 'gift' came, it showed just how much danger I was in, so I did the only thing I could, I ran. Now I find myself in a place special to my mother suddenly surrounded by people who care about me. But, like everyone in this world, they are not without issues and battles of their own. Colin, Kaleb, Mack and Ryker fought their way into my heart and showed me love I didn't know existed. But when the danger I had been running from finds me and an enemy of my guys' surfaces, it leaves me questioning, will we make it through it alive and together? Warning: This is a medium burn contemporary dark Reverse Harem novel. Triggering elements appear throughout the story.

Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book • School Library Journal Best Book of the Year • Booklist Editors' Choice • Kirkus Reviews Best Children's Book • Booklist Top 10 Diverse Books for Middle Grade or Older Readers • Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Books This award-winning book will help kids understand the life and legacy of Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ★"(A) history that everyone should know: required and inspired." —Kirkus Reviews This picture book tells the story of a nine-year-old girl who in 1968 witnessed the Memphis sanitation strike - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s final stand for justice before his assassination - when her father, a sanitation worker, participated in the protest. In February 1968, two African American sanitation workers were killed by unsafe equipment in Memphis, Tennessee. Outraged at the city's refusal to recognize a labor union that would fight for higher pay and safer working conditions, sanitation workers went on strike. The strike lasted two months, during which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was called to help with the protests. While his presence was greatly inspiring to the community, this unfortunately would be his last stand for justice. He was assassinated in his Memphis hotel the day after delivering his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" sermon in Mason Temple Church. Inspired by the memories of a teacher who participated in the strike as a child, author Alice Faye Duncan reveals the story of the Memphis sanitation strike from the perspective of a young girl with a riveting combination of poetry and prose.

Founded in 1981, the international group of architects, Memphis, shook the design world to its foundations. Based in Italy and led by Ettore Sottsass, it overturned and re-shaped the pre-suppositions on which the production of so-called Modern Design is based. It became the almost mythical symbol of the New Design. Laughing out loud at our culture and at itself, Memphis pulled out all stops when it came to colour, pattern, decoration and ornamentation.