The water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard have built their own underwater society and must reclaim the memories of their past to shape their future in this brilliantly imaginative novella inspired by the Hugo Award nominated song The Deep from Daveed Diggs' rap group Clipping.

"Yetu holds the memories for her people -- water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners -- who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one -- the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu. Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface, escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities -- and discovers a world her people left behind long ago. Yetu will learn more than she ever expected to about her own past -- and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they'll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity -- and own who they really are." --

Born a free man in New York State in 1808, Solomon Northup was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841. He spent the next 12 years as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation, and during this time he was frequently abused and often afraid for his life. This is his detailed description of slave life and plantation society.

This harrowing true story of Solomon Northup was the basis for the Academy Award-winning film 12 Years a Slave. In it, he takes the reader on an unforgettable journey from the slave markets in Washington, D.C., and New Orleans to the major cotton and sugar plantations in Louisiana. Born and raised a freeman in New York, with a house, a loving wife and two children, Northup was offered a short-term engagement as a violinist in Washington D.C. where he was tricked, drugged and sold into slavery in the deep south. Kept in bondage in Louisiana for 12 years, enduring backbreaking labor, unimaginable violence, and inhumane treatment at the hands of cruel masters, Northup was finally able to write to friends and family in New York, who succeeded in securing his release. This memoir is a shocking portrait of America's most insidious institution and is even more disturbing in print than in the film. Published shortly after Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist classic Uncle Tom's Cabin, Northup'

This magnificent volume -- and the exhibition it accompanies at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum -- is a soaring tribute to the harmonious nature of Brazilian art and culture. Juxtaposing Baroque masterpieces from the 17th and 18th centuries with essential works of modern and contemporary art as well as indigenous and Afro-Brazilian arts, the book's editors explore the integration of sensorial and spiritual experience in Brazilian art -- the union of body and soul.