This work challenges the believe that West Indian American girls are but assert agency in defining race through strategic consumption of popular culture.

Overwhelmingly, Black teenage girls are negatively represented in national and global popular discourses, either as being “at risk” for teenage pregnancy, obesity, or sexually transmitted diseases, or as helpless victims of inner city poverty and violence. Such popular representations are pervasive and often portray Black adolescents’ consumer and leisure culture as corruptive, uncivilized, and pathological. In She’s Mad Real, Oneka LaBennett draws on over a decade of researching teenage West Indian girls in the Flatbush and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn to argue that Black youth are in fact strategic consumers of popular culture and through this consumption they assert far more agency in defining race, ethnicity, and gender than academic and popular discourses tend to acknowledge. Importantly, LaBennett also studies West Indian girls’ consumer and leisure culture within public spaces in order to analyze how teens like China are marginalized and policed as they attempt to carve out places for themselves within New York’s contested terrains.

‘Brave and beautiful.’ Stylist Magazine ‘Social media’s answer to Carol Ann Duffy’ Sunday Times STYLE ‘Divine.’ Cecelia Ahern

Ebony, Phoenix and Joi are three thirty-somethings with some serious man problems! Ebony thinks that she's found love with Dray, her boyfriend of three years, until she discovers that their relationship is not what it once was. Ebony is not ready to be without a man in her life. Will her trust issues and broken heart make her go back to her promiscuous ways? Phoenix is attractive, single, and childless. She has a successful career and lives a very comfortable lifestyle. One would think that she's a great catch, but when her superficial, diva-like ways threaten her chances to be with someone who truly loves her, is she willing to make a change? Joi gets nothing but drama because her man, Tate, has a baby with his ex-girlfriend. Joi is determined to have Tate all to herself, by any means necessary. Will she finally get her man, or will her ploy to get Tate end up doing more harm than good to their relationship? Mad 'Cause She Ain't You explores the frustrating, sometimes hilarious side of sex and love in the lives of three black women. Find out who learns the lessons, and who will have to repeat the class.

Maas offers a wickedly funny, inside look at what it was really like to be an ad woman on Madison Avenue in the 1960s and 1970s, from casual sex to professional serfdom, in this immensely entertaining and bittersweet memoir.

One of Amazon’s Best Books of 2022 So Far! “Gloriously recommended.” —Historical Novel Society A gripping and compelling novel based on the true story of fearless reporter Nellie Bly, who will stop at nothing to prove that a woman’s place is on the front page. In 1887 New York City, Nellie Bly has ambitions beyond writing for the ladies pages, but all the editors on Newspaper Row think women are too emotional, respectable and delicate to do the job. But then the New York World challenges her to an assignment she'd be mad to accept and mad to refuse: go undercover as a patient at Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum for women. For months, rumors have been swirling about deplorable conditions at Blackwell’s but no reporter can get in—that is, until Nellie feigns insanity, gets herself committed and attempts to survive ten days in the madhouse. Once inside, Nellie befriends her fellow patients who help her uncover shocking truths about the asylum. It’s a story that promises to be explosive—but will she get out before rival reporters get the scoop? From USA Today bestselling author Maya Rodale comes a witty, energetic and uplifting novel about a woman who defied convention to become the most famous reporter in Gilded Age New York. Perfect for fans of hidden histories about women who triumph.

“Passions, the edge of madness, forbidden obsessions, runaway libidos and dangerous desires . . . a thinking man’s Fatal Attraction” (Chicago Sun-Times). In A Woman Run Mad, John L’Heureux delivers a novel that is part comedy of manners and part psychosexual thriller. Blocked writer, accidental scholar, inattentive husband, all J.J. Quinn wants is peace, and he has gone to buy his wife an expensive handbag to accomplish it. As the bag in question walks out the door under the arm of a beautiful, aristocratic shoplifter, though, Quinn’s curiosity leads him deep into mystery and danger. The shoplifter is Sarah Slade, a Boston Brahmin attempting to ditch a past as bloody as Medea’s. Compared to Quinn’s hypercompetent, Euripides-scholar wife, Claire, the unhinged Sarah is an alluring breath of fresh air—but, of course, Quinn has no idea of the Pandora’s box he’s opened. Acclaimed by Newsweek as “witty and literate . . . Grand Guignol for grown-ups,” A Woman Run Mad is an unsettling, deeply satisfying novel. A New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. “A superior suspense story . . . that might well have appealed to a writer like Patricia Highsmith, a drama of interlocking obsessions.” —The New York Times “What a wonderfully hideous, gruesome, grueling horror-marathon of a book! A cross between a Henry James novel and the Texas chain saw massacre. I loved it.” —Carolyn See, author of Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America “Normality—as our time understands the word—and monstrosity are L’Heureux’s poles, and he joins them with extraordinary dexterity . . . The ending is not to be revealed.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review