African American Titles

Sula

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 5 hours 46 minutes

Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom—a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma’s girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a... Read more

Jazz - Abridged

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 3 hours

“One of my favorite books of all time - Toni Morrison is one of the greatest writers to have ever lived in my opinion. Jazz opens by telling the reader everything, and picking the pieces apart throughout the book. Violet is the main character that tries to make sense of tragedy at home and growing older. As the reader we feel sorry for her... Read more

Native Son

By: Richard Wright
Narrated by: Peter Francis James
Length: 17 hours 44 minutes

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels“If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son.” – Henry Louis Gates Jr.""The most powerful American novel to appear since The Grapes of Wrath."" —The New YorkerWhen it was... Read more

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

By: Maya Angelou
Narrated by: Maya Angelou
Length: 10 hours 10 minutes

“A lot can be said about this autobiography - it is one of the best I have ever read. The stories are personal and well accounted for, and the reader has no choice but to regard her life and strength through hardship so inspiring. Before reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I had a good idea of Angelou through her poetry and lectures. Her... Read more

Black Boy

By: Richard Wright
Narrated by: Peter Francis James
Length: 15 hours 28 minutes

Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. At once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment, Black Boy is a poignant record of struggle and endurance—a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time.When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy... Read more

Their Eyes Were Watching God

By: Zora Neale Hurston
Narrated by: Ruby Dee
Length: 6 hours 44 minutes

“This book is a masterpiece. Zora Neale Hurston explores stages in a woman’s life so powerfully. Ruby Dee’s audiobook narration is the best audiobook narration I’ve ever heard. She expresses so much emotion and personality. She brings the characters to life and she savors every perfectly chosen word of the text. Read more

Invisible Man

By: Ralph Ellison
Narrated by: Joe Morton
Length: 18 hours 36 minutes

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching--yet always with... Read more

Playing In The Dark

Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 3 hours 9 minutes

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner

Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that... Read more

The Bluest Eye

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 7 hours 5 minutes

“Toni Morrison was a visionary. This, her first novel, was my first foray into her work, and I found it approachable, yet deep with meaning. It borrows its structure from a children’s Dick and Jane story, which Toni reads like a haunting incantation. Her narration of the entire book is flawless and stunning, like the text itself. The novel... Read more

Blues Dancing

By: Diane McKinney-Whetstone
Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor
Length: 11 hours 35 minutes

"McKinney-Whetstone uses her gift for language to weave a love story that spans more than twenty years and three lives. … Blues Dancing is a novel well worth curling up with a long winter’s night."—Essence From acclaimed writer Diane McKinney-Whetstone, a richly spun tale of love and passion, betrayal, redemption, and faith, set in contemporary... Read more

The Fire Next Time

By: James Baldwin
Narrated by: Jesse Martin
Length: 2 hours 25 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The book that galvanized the nation, gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement in the 1960s—and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. - “The finest essay I’ve ever read.” —Ta-Nehisi CoatesAt once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the... Read more

The Devil Finds Work

An Essay

By: James Baldwin
Narrated by: Dion Graham
Length: 3 hours 41 minutes

Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics.Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s... Read more

Another Country

By: James Baldwin
Narrated by: Dion Graham
Length: 16 hours 13 minutes

“I’m reading Another Country by Baldwin because it’s personally important for me to read stories and narratives from the past that focus on race and sexuality. It helps me process and compare/contrast the past with present. Read more

Going to Meet the Man

By: James Baldwin
Narrated by: Dion Graham
Length: 7 hours 49 minutes

“There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.” The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water. It may be the heroin that... Read more

Nobody Knows My Name

More Notes of a Native Son

By: James Baldwin
Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly
Length: 5 hours 49 minutes

James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name records the last months of this famed American writer’s ten-year self-exile in Europe, his return to America and to Harlem, and his first trip south at the time of the school integration battles. It contains Baldwin’s controversial and intimate profiles of Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Ingmar Bergman.... Read more

Zora and Langston

A Story of Friendship and Betrayal

By: Yuval Taylor
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 8 hours 37 minutes

Zora and Langston is the dramatic and moving story of one of the most influential friendships in literature.



They were best friends. They were collaborators, literary gadflies, and champions of the common people. They were the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston, the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Langston... Read more

The Shadow King

By: Maaza Mengiste
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 16 hours 9 minutes

Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and named a best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Elle, Time, and more, The Shadow King is an “unforgettable epic from an immensely talented author who’s unafraid to take risks” (Michael Schaub, NPR).

Set during Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, The Shadow King takes us back to the first... Read more

The Mothers

A Novel

By: Brit Bennett
Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
Length: 9 hours 54 minutes

“The 'mothers' of this book's title refers to the gaggle of elderly churchgoing women who comment on the congregation around them, especially the trio of Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey. But The Mothers is about more than that -- it refers to the concept of motherhood, whether biological, lost, aborted, adoptive, or conflicted. The three young people at... Read more

The Vanishing Half

A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)

By: Brit Bennett
Narrated by: Shayna Small
Length: 11 hours 33 minutes

“This is an intriguing story, part family saga, part social commentary, about twin sisters whose lives diverged into two very different directions. Desiree and Stella grew up in Mallard, Louisiana, a place that didn't show up on any map and a community that in the 1960s was racist in a peculiar way: the population was almost exclusively very... Read more