LeVar Burton launched a digital book club May 2021 and membership is open to all.
The LeVar Burton Book Club by Fable, a social reading app that encourages users to build safe communities and foster mental wellness through reading.
Every three months, Burton will select three new books to be added to a “folio” and will handpick a new book monthly for the group to read as a unit. Each folio also comes with a customized book club discussion board to help readers engage with their virtual community.
Burton’s advocacy for literature is unyielding, as he also hosts the LeVar Burton Readspodcastfor children, teenagers, and adults.
A Confederacy of Dunces
By Toole, John Kennedy
After more than three decades, the peerless wit and indulgent absurdity of A Confederacy of Dunces continues to attract new readers. Though the manuscript was rejected by many publishers during Toole's lifetime, his mother successfully published the book years after her son's suicide, and it won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This literary underdog and comic masterpiece has sold more than two million copies in twenty-three languages.The 35th anniversary edition of A Confederacy of Dunces celebrates Toole's novel as well as one of the most memorable protagonists in American literature, Ignatius J. Reilly, whom Walker Percy dubbed "slob extraordinaire, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one." Set in New Orleans with a wild cast of characters including Ignatius and his mother; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levi Pants; inept, wan Patrolman Mancuso; Darlene, the Bourbon Street stripper with a penchant for poultry; and Jones, the jivecat in space-age dark glasses, the novel serves as an outlandish but believable tribute to a city defined by its parade of eccentric denizens.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780807159606
|
Hardcover
Roots
By Haley, Alex
A new eight-hour event series based on Roots will be simulcast on the History Channel, Lifetime, and A&E over four consecutive nights beginning Memorial Day, May 30, 2016"Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a man-child was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte."So begins Roots, one of the most extraordinary and influential books of our time. Through the story of one family - his family - Alex Haley unforgettably brings to life the monumental two-century drama of Kunta Kinte and the six generations who came after him: slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lumber mill workmen and Pullman porters, lawyers and architects...and one author.A national and international phenomenon at the time of its original publication, Roots continues to enthrall readers with its masterful narrative drive and exceptional emotional power, speaking to us all with an undiminished resonance and relevance."In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage.... Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning no matter what our attainments in life." - Alex HaleyWith an introduction by Michael Eric DysonRootsTheBook.com
Publisher: n/a
|
9780306824852
|
Paperback
Noor
By Okorafor, Nnedi
Anwuli Okwudili prefers to be called AO. To her, these initials have always stood for Artificial Organism. AO has never really felt...natural, and that's putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was "wrong". But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that disabled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world views it, as freakish, unnatural, even the work of the devil, AO embraces all that she is: A woman with a ton of major and necessary body augmentations. And then one day she goes to her local market and everything goes wrong.Once on the run, she meets a Fulani herdsman named DNA and the race against time across the deserts of Northern Nigeria begins.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780756416096
|
Hardcover
Deacon King Kong
By Mcbride, James
From James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, comes a wise and witty novel about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting.In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range.The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird. In Deacon King Kong, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood's Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself. As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters--caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York--overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.Bringing to these pages both his masterly storytelling skills and his abiding faith in humanity, James McBride has written a novel every bit as involving as The Good Lord Bird and as emotionally honest as The Color of Water. Told with insight and wit, Deacon King Kong demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780735216723
|
Hardcover
Go Tell It on the Mountain
By Baldwin, James
This haunting coming-of-age story, based in part on James Baldwin's childhood in Harlem, is an American classic. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was Baldwin's first major work. With a potent combination of lyrical compassion and resonant rage, he portrays a fourteen-year-old boy questioning the terms of his identity. John Grimes is the stepson of a fire-breathing and abusive Pentecostal preacher in Harlem during the Depression. The action of this short novel spans a single day in John's life, and yet manages to encompass on an epic scale his family's troubled past and his own inchoate longings for the future, set against a shining vision of a city where he both does and does not belong. Baldwin's story illuminates the racism his characters face as well as the double-edged role religion plays in their lives, both oppressive and inspirational.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781101907610
|
Print book
Parable of the Sower
By Butler, Octavia E
Parable of the Sower is the Butlerian odyssey of one woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized. The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old black woman with the hereditary train of "hyperempathy" - which causes her to feel others' pain as her own - sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781609807191
|
Print book
The Fire This Time
By Ward, Jesmyn
The New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race - collected by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation - are "thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful. The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify" (USA TODAY) .. In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwins 1962 "Letter to My Nephew," which was later published in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time. Addressing his fifteen-year-old namesake on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin wrote: "You know and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon." Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward knows that Baldwins words ring as true as ever today. In response, she has gathered short essays, memoir, and a few essential poems to engage the question of race in the United States. And she has turned to some of her generations most original thinkers and writers to give voice to their concerns. The Fire This Time is divided into three parts that shine a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestle with our current predicament, and envision a better future. Of the eighteen pieces, ten were written specifically for this volume. In the fifty-odd years since Baldwins essay was published, entire generations have dared everything and made significant progress. But the idea that we are living in the post-Civil Rights era, that we are a "post-racial" society is an inaccurate and harmful reflection of a truth the country must confront. Baldwins "fire next time" is now upon us, and it needs to be talked about. Contributors include Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Garnette Cadogan, Edwidge Danticat, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Mitchell S. Jackson, Honoree Jeffers, Kima Jones, Kiese Laymon, Daniel Jose Older, Emily Raboteau, Claudia Rankine, Clint Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Wendy S. Walters, Isabel Wilkerson, and Kevin Young.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781501126345
|
Hardcover
Aftermath
By Burton, Levar
The acclaimed actor's shockingly prescient novel of speculative fiction "presents a near-future United States torn apart by civil war and deep racial strife" (Tampa Bay Times) . For the first time ever, available as an audiobook read by the author.America today is teetering on the edge of the alarming vision presented in LeVar Burton's debut novel, written more than two decades ago.... In 2012, the first African American president is assassinated by a White extremist - just four days after he is elected. The horrific tragedy leads to riots, financial collapse, and ultimately, a full-on civil war. In its aftermath, millions are left homeless as famine and disease spread throughout the country.But from Chicago, a mysterious voice cries out..
LeVar Burton launched a digital book club May 2021 and membership is open to all.
The LeVar Burton Book Club by Fable, a social reading app that encourages users to build safe communities and foster mental wellness through reading.
Every three months, Burton will select three new books to be added to a “folio” and will handpick a new book monthly for the group to read as a unit. Each folio also comes with a customized book club discussion board to help readers engage with their virtual community.
Burton’s advocacy for literature is unyielding, as he also hosts the LeVar Burton Reads podcast for children, teenagers, and adults.
A Confederacy of Dunces
By Toole, John Kennedy
After more than three decades, the peerless wit and indulgent absurdity of A Confederacy of Dunces continues to attract new readers. Though the manuscript was rejected by many publishers during Toole's lifetime, his mother successfully published the book years after her son's suicide, and it won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This literary underdog and comic masterpiece has sold more than two million copies in twenty-three languages.The 35th anniversary edition of A Confederacy of Dunces celebrates Toole's novel as well as one of the most memorable protagonists in American literature, Ignatius J. Reilly, whom Walker Percy dubbed "slob extraordinaire, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one." Set in New Orleans with a wild cast of characters including Ignatius and his mother; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levi Pants; inept, wan Patrolman Mancuso; Darlene, the Bourbon Street stripper with a penchant for poultry; and Jones, the jivecat in space-age dark glasses, the novel serves as an outlandish but believable tribute to a city defined by its parade of eccentric denizens.
Roots
By Haley, Alex
A new eight-hour event series based on Roots will be simulcast on the History Channel, Lifetime, and A&E over four consecutive nights beginning Memorial Day, May 30, 2016"Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a man-child was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte."So begins Roots, one of the most extraordinary and influential books of our time. Through the story of one family - his family - Alex Haley unforgettably brings to life the monumental two-century drama of Kunta Kinte and the six generations who came after him: slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lumber mill workmen and Pullman porters, lawyers and architects...and one author.A national and international phenomenon at the time of its original publication, Roots continues to enthrall readers with its masterful narrative drive and exceptional emotional power, speaking to us all with an undiminished resonance and relevance."In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage.... Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning no matter what our attainments in life." - Alex HaleyWith an introduction by Michael Eric DysonRootsTheBook.com
Noor
By Okorafor, Nnedi
Anwuli Okwudili prefers to be called AO. To her, these initials have always stood for Artificial Organism. AO has never really felt...natural, and that's putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was "wrong". But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that disabled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world views it, as freakish, unnatural, even the work of the devil, AO embraces all that she is: A woman with a ton of major and necessary body augmentations. And then one day she goes to her local market and everything goes wrong.Once on the run, she meets a Fulani herdsman named DNA and the race against time across the deserts of Northern Nigeria begins.
Deacon King Kong
By Mcbride, James
From James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, comes a wise and witty novel about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting.In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range.The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird. In Deacon King Kong, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood's Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself. As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters--caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York--overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.Bringing to these pages both his masterly storytelling skills and his abiding faith in humanity, James McBride has written a novel every bit as involving as The Good Lord Bird and as emotionally honest as The Color of Water. Told with insight and wit, Deacon King Kong demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.
Go Tell It on the Mountain
By Baldwin, James
This haunting coming-of-age story, based in part on James Baldwin's childhood in Harlem, is an American classic. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was Baldwin's first major work. With a potent combination of lyrical compassion and resonant rage, he portrays a fourteen-year-old boy questioning the terms of his identity. John Grimes is the stepson of a fire-breathing and abusive Pentecostal preacher in Harlem during the Depression. The action of this short novel spans a single day in John's life, and yet manages to encompass on an epic scale his family's troubled past and his own inchoate longings for the future, set against a shining vision of a city where he both does and does not belong. Baldwin's story illuminates the racism his characters face as well as the double-edged role religion plays in their lives, both oppressive and inspirational.
Parable of the Sower
By Butler, Octavia E
Parable of the Sower is the Butlerian odyssey of one woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized. The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old black woman with the hereditary train of "hyperempathy" - which causes her to feel others' pain as her own - sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown.
The Fire This Time
By Ward, Jesmyn
The New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race - collected by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation - are "thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful. The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify" (USA TODAY) .. In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwins 1962 "Letter to My Nephew," which was later published in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time. Addressing his fifteen-year-old namesake on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin wrote: "You know and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon." Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward knows that Baldwins words ring as true as ever today. In response, she has gathered short essays, memoir, and a few essential poems to engage the question of race in the United States. And she has turned to some of her generations most original thinkers and writers to give voice to their concerns. The Fire This Time is divided into three parts that shine a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestle with our current predicament, and envision a better future. Of the eighteen pieces, ten were written specifically for this volume. In the fifty-odd years since Baldwins essay was published, entire generations have dared everything and made significant progress. But the idea that we are living in the post-Civil Rights era, that we are a "post-racial" society is an inaccurate and harmful reflection of a truth the country must confront. Baldwins "fire next time" is now upon us, and it needs to be talked about. Contributors include Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Garnette Cadogan, Edwidge Danticat, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Mitchell S. Jackson, Honoree Jeffers, Kima Jones, Kiese Laymon, Daniel Jose Older, Emily Raboteau, Claudia Rankine, Clint Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Wendy S. Walters, Isabel Wilkerson, and Kevin Young.
Aftermath
By Burton, Levar
The acclaimed actor's shockingly prescient novel of speculative fiction "presents a near-future United States torn apart by civil war and deep racial strife" (Tampa Bay Times) . For the first time ever, available as an audiobook read by the author.America today is teetering on the edge of the alarming vision presented in LeVar Burton's debut novel, written more than two decades ago.... In 2012, the first African American president is assassinated by a White extremist - just four days after he is elected. The horrific tragedy leads to riots, financial collapse, and ultimately, a full-on civil war. In its aftermath, millions are left homeless as famine and disease spread throughout the country.But from Chicago, a mysterious voice cries out..