With their lives spinning out of control, sixteen-year-old Buddy Rivers and his girl friend Angela create their own way of staying alive in Brooklyn in the mid-1960s.

When she discovers that big-headed rancher Jesse Pleasant has a softer side during a painfully awkward showing at a community date auction, former tech consultant Lily-Grace Leroux warms to the sparks flying between them, never dreaming that she could have her own happily ever after.

After spending two months in a juvenile detention center for a crime he did not commit, seventeen-year-old Andre Jackson returns home and tries to adapt to a Covid-19 world and find his missing best friend.

Z.Z. Packer's first collection of short stories is rich with unexpected turns, indelible images, and penetrating insight that belies someone so young. Her stories plunge us into the worlds of people living on the edge and to the flashpoints that make or break them, that shape their worldviews forever. In The Stranger, a third-grade girl tries to find her place in the microcosm of summer camp in the larger world in 1981 during the height of the Atlanta...

With so many beautiful hairstyles to choose from like perms and locs, a little girl decides to get the freshest fade on the block.

At night the sounds of various animals lull a child to sleep.

A mischievous eight-year-old boy helps his sister with a bully problem, while facing a bully of his own at school.

Discovering a book of Langston Hughes' poetry in the library helps Langston cope with the loss of his mother, relocating from Alabama to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and being bullied.

"After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and cornbread, fist fights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires him to run for sheriff. He wins, and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of the county. Then a year to the day after his election, a young Black man is fatally shot by Titus's deputies. Titus pledges to follow the truth wherever...

When flood waters submerge their New Orleans neighborhood in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a young cornet player and his parents evacuate their home and struggle to survive and stay together.