After a high-profile case puts him in the headlines, private detective John Shaft is looking for something low profile and easy that will keep him out of the spotlight, out of danger. Shaft takes a missing person case that proves to be more difficult than he initially thought. At the same time, he is hired to be a consultant on a low budget film that may or may not be based on his life, and proves to be as dangerous as any job he's ever had. But when there's danger all about, John Shaft is the cat that won't cop out - even if it means squaring off against sadistic gangsters that want him dead.

Who is John Shaft? John Shaft is a private eye. John Shaft is a black man made of muscle and ice, and he has no prejudices. John Shaft will kill anyone... black or white. When the cloistered daughter of Harlem's crime boss discovers the true nature of her father's work, she runs off to be as bad as Dad. By the time she disappears, she's into sex, liquor, dope, and a few other scenes. Now, Big Daddy wants Shaft to get his baby back. The tough, take-no-guff detective goes to work... and the Mafia, the Black militants, the NYPD, and City Hall go to work on him. The original and unabridged Shaft novel by Ernest Tidyman, the 1970 tour de force of hardboiled crime fiction that introduced an unsuspecting world to a cultural icon.

Working as a consultant on a film proves to be more difficult that Shaft had expected. Not t to mention more dangerous. Things take a potentially deadly turn when the police bring Shaft in for questioning on an unrelated case.

Like an unstoppable force of nature, private detective John Shaft is back with a vengeance. Ernest Tidyman s iconic detective returns in the first original Shaft novel in more than forty years, and he s as bad as ever. When the Godfather of crime in Harlem reaches out to Shaft for a favor, the hardboiled detective finds himself caught in a web of violence and murder. No one is safe as the bullets start to fly and the bodies start to drop, leaving Shaft with only two options: kill or be killed.

A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR • BOOKLISTS' EDITOR'S CHOICE • ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “At once a film book, a history book, and a civil rights book.… Without a doubt, not only the very best film book [but] also one of the best books of the year in any genre. An absolutely essential read.” —Shondaland This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies—from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther—using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. From the acclaimed author of The Butler and Showdown. Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood's first blockbuster—Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes. He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the screen: from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves—including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, among many others. An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.

WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARD • A bold and fascinating graphic novel history of the revolutionary Black Panther Party. Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was a radical political organization that stood in defiant contrast to the mainstream civil rights movement. This gripping illustrated history explores the impact and significance of the Panthers, from their social, educational, and healthcare programs that were designed to uplift the Black community to their battle against police brutality through citizen patrols and frequent clashes with the FBI, which targeted the Party from its outset. Using dramatic comic book-style retellings and illustrated profiles of key figures, The Black Panther Party captures the major events, people, and actions of the party, as well as their cultural and political influence and enduring legacy.

School kid Ryder Stone’s life is turned upside down when he’s caught in the middle of a fight between two super-powered opponents, both of whom want Ryder’s secret power--a power he doesn’t know he has! Can Ryder unlock the hero from within before it’s too late?