Philmont Castle is a man who has it all: wealth, respect, and connections. He’s the last person you’d expect
to fall prey to a murderer, but when his body is found on the grounds of a Harlem mansion, the young writer Eddie Wesley, along with the woman he loves, Aurelia Treene, are pulled into a twenty-year search for the truth. The disappearance of Eddie’s sister June makes their investigation even more troubling. As Eddie and Aurelia uncover layer upon layer of intrigue, their odyssey takes them from the wealthy drawing rooms of New York through the shady corners of radical politics all the way to the Oval Office and President Nixon himself.

Suspenseful, provocative, and witty, Palace Council turns our assumptions inside out and reminds us how the struggles of that era set the stage for America today.

Biography
Long before his spellbinding legal thriller The Emperor of Ocean Park, Stephen L. Carter’s nonfiction titles helped shape the national debate on issues ranging from the role of religion in American political culture to the impact of integrity and civility on our daily lives.

Biography
Rick James first signed with Motown Records with a band called the Mynah Birds where he played alongside Neil Young. Years later, he signed with Motown as a solo artist and released his debut album, Come Get It!, in 1978. As a producer and writer, he lent his talents to established acts like the Temptations, up-and-comers like Teena Marie and the Mary Jane Girls, and amateurs like comedian Eddie Murphy. He died in 2004.

Biography
Faith Evans started her music career as a backup singer and songwriter for artists like Hi-Five, Mary J. Blige, Pebbles, Al B. Sure, Usher, Tony Thompson, and Christopher Williams. In 1994 she met producer/impresario Sean “Puffy” Combs, who signed her to his Bad Boy label. In 1995, Evans released her debut album, Faith, which went platinum. The same year, she met fellow Bad Boy artist the Notorious B.I.G. and married him after a courtship of just nine days. The couple had unofficially separated 3 years later when Biggie was shot and killed in March 1997.

Faith lives in California with her husband and four children.

Sidney Poitier was the first black actor to win the Academy Award for best actor for his outstanding performance in Lilies of the Field in 1963. His landmark films include The Defiant Ones, A Patch of Blue, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and To Sir, With Love. He has starred in over forty films, directed nine, and written four. He is the author of two autobiographies: This Life and the “Oprah’s Book Club” pick and New York Times bestseller The Measure of a Man. Among many other accolades, Poitier has been awarded the Screen Actors Guild’s highest honor, the Life Achievement Award, for an outstanding career and humanitarian accomplishment. He is married, has six daughters, four grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.

An icon of hip-hop, a father of six, and an ordained minister, Rev Run has developed a parenting style that is in a class by itself. With his wife, Justine, he launched the blockbuster reality series Run’s House on MTV, now filming its fifth season. The show has proven wildly popular in large part due to the way the Simmons family responds to very twenty-first-century issues. Emphasizing firm boundaries, noble values, discipline, and faith in an age marked by shallow materialism and fragmented families, Rev Run now shares the proven principles that have given his children a firm foundation, including:

• Run your family as the COEs: Chief Officers of Everything.
• Understand that you can never correct what you don’t confront.
• Lead by example, not by preaching: Hypocrisy and parenting are a destructive combination.
• Today’s fast-paced world can often make children feel small; your job is to help them feel large.
• Older children need more rules and parental involvement, not less.

Reaching an average weekly audience of 4.1 million viewers, Run’s House speaks to America’s fascination with high-profile parents. Take Back Your Family brings home the behind-the-scenes wisdom of hip-hop’s first family to everyone seeking solid guidance for raising a new generation.
Biography

A founding member of the chart-topping hip-hop group Run-D.M.C. (over 30 million albums sold), Rev Run (aka Joseph Simmons) is now a minister at Zoe Ministries.

His wife, Justine Simmons (formerly MC Justine) costars on their blockbuster reality show, Run’s House.

Chris Morrow is the coauthor of Do You! with Russell Simmons, the creator of Def Jam Records, and the older brother of Rev Run.

Three prolific authors bring truth to the title of this heart-wrenching book, Love Is Never Painless, with a collection of novellas that explores the deeper side of love — the side rarely explored in love stories.

In Eileen M. Johnson’s “How the Other Half Lives,” longtime friends Jamellah and Fernecia are having trouble with the men in their lives. And as their worlds seem tocrumble, they must count on their friendship to keep it together.

In “Love Is 2 Blame,” by V. Anthony Rivers, Malcolm is devastated after his two-year relationship with Shaylisa ends. And trying to move on will not be easy — but the lovely Zahara may be the perfect woman to show Malcolm what true love is all about.

In Zane’s “Staring Evil in the Face,” Robier has everything: a successful career,beautiful children, and the woman of his dreams. Having loved Tiphanie since college, he is determined to keep his marital vows — until Tiphanie is involved in a horrible car accident that changes the entire course of their lives.

From nervous breakdowns to drug addiction, in Love Is Never Painless, Zane,Johnson, and Rivers have penned powerful stories that not only will have readers talking, but will bring a new perspective to their own relationships.

As the cultural critic Jabari Asim explains, none of these questions can be pondered effectively without a clear knowledge of the word’s bitter legacy. Here he draws on a wide range of examples from science, politics, the arts, and more to reveal how the slur has both reflected and spread the scourge of bigotry in America over the past four hundred years. He ponders the contributions of cultural figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain, W.E.B. Du Bois and Margaret Mitchell, Dave Chappelle and NWA. Through this history, Asim shows how completely our national psyche is affected by the use of the word, and why it’s such a flashpoint today.

Biography
JABARI ASIM is the editor in chief of The Crisis, the NAACP’s flagship publication. For the previous eleven years he was an editor at the Washington Post Book World. His writing has appeared in Essence, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the Hungry Mind Review, Emerge, and elsewhere. He lives in Maryland.

“Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said thy edge should blunter be than appetite”

—William Shakespeare

What goes together better than dessert and romance? Talented novelist Sarah Strohmeyer puts a fresh spin on confection and courting with SWEET LOVE, her tenth and most satisfying tale to date. A rising star in women’s fiction, Strohmeyer’s witty, enjoyable novels have earned her a growing fan base and great reviews. Just in time for summer, SWEET LOVE, as Meg Cabot says, “opening a book by Sarah Strohmeyer is as rich as chocolate layer cake—and just as delicious.”

Mother knows best—at least that’s what Betty Mueller thought when she secretly sabotaged her teenage daughter Julie’s crush on Michael Slayton, the dreamy, wild, and older neighbor with a penchant for Shakespeare and the pedigree of trailer trash. But twenty years later, Betty realizes that she made a big mistake, and that Michael was not just a teenage crush, but Julie’s one true love. Without Michael, Julie has become a divorced workaholic raising a daughter alone. And because of a terrible misunderstanding several years earlier, the one man who could make her happy is the one man to whom she won’t speak a word.

Determined to make amends and give her daughter the life she deserves, Betty stages her last great feat of mother hood by reuniting the couple in a dessert class where she hopes the sweetness of chocolate will erase the bitter feelings that have pent up over the years. But will Julie and Michael be able to forget the past and let love in? Strohmeyer, who knows “what chick lit is supposed to be” (Booklist), SWEET LOVE is a tasty testament to love, dessert, and the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sarah Strohmeyer is the author of The Cinderella Pact, The Sleeping Beauty Proposal, Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives, and the popular Bubbles mystery series. She has worked as a journalist for numerous publications, including The Boston Globe, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Salon.com. She lives with her husband and two children outside Montpelier, Vermont.

Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of “free” black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

The neoslavery system exploited legal loopholes and federal policies that discouraged prosecution of whites for continuing to hold black workers against their wills. As it poured millions of dollars into southern government treasuries, the new slavery also became a key instrument in the terrorization of African Americans seeking full participation in the U.S. political system.

Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Slavery by AnotherName unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II.

Slavery by Another Name is a moving, sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

Brady Bledsoe and his mother, Carmyn, have a strong relationship. A single mother, faithful churchgoer, and the owner of several successful Atlanta beauty salons, Carmyn has devoted herself to her son and his dream of becoming a professional football player. Brady has always followed her lead, including becoming a member of the church’s “Celibacy Circle.” Now in his senior year at college, the smart, and very handsome, Brady is a lead contender for the Heisman Trophy and a spot in the NFL.

As sports agents hover around Brady, Barrett, a beautiful and charming cheerleader, sets her mind on tempting the celibate Brady and getting a piece of his multimillion-dollar future—but is that all she wants from him, and is she acting alone?

Carmyn is determined to protect her son. She’s also determined to protect the secret she’s kept from Brady his whole life. As things heat up on campus and Carmyn and Brady’s idyllic relationship starts to crumble, mother and son begin to wonder about the other—are you just too good to be true?

A sweeping novel about mothers and sons, football and beauty shops, secrets and lies, JUST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE has all the ingredients that have made E. Lynn Harris a bestselling author: family, friendship, faith, and love.