Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel, winner of the prestigious National Book Award, tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me.' Published in 1952 when American society was on the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison's invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual. As John Callahan says, 'In an extrarordinary imaginative leap, he hit upon the single word for the different yet shared condition of African Americans, Americans, and, for that matter, the human individual in the 20th century, and beyond'.

This edition includes Ralph Ellison's introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, a fascinating account of the novel's seven year gestation.

The memoir of legendary cartoonist John Callahan, now a major motion picture directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, and Rooney Mara. Featuring more than 60 of Callahan's original cartoons In 1972, at the age of twenty-one, John Callahan was involved in a car crash that made him a quadriplegic. A heavy drinker since the age of twelve (alcohol had played a role in his crash), the accident could have been the beginning of a downward spiral. Instead, it sparked a personal transformation. By 1978, Callahan had sworn off drinking for good and began to draw cartoons. Over the next three decades, until his death in 2010, Callahan would become one of America's most beloved - and at times polarising - cartoonists. His work, which shows off a wacky and sometimes warped sense of humour, pokes fun at social conventions and pushes boundaries. One cartoon features Christ at the cross with a thought bubble reading 'T.G.I.F.' In another, three sheriffs on horseback approach an empty wheelchair in the desert. 'Don't worry,' one sheriff says to another, 'He won't get far on foot.' Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot recounts Callahan's life story, from the harrowing to the hilarious. Featuring more than sixty of Callahan's cartoons, it's a compelling look at art, addiction, disability and fame.

Published after Ellison's death, this follow-up to Invisible Man is a thunderous epic of memory, faith, loss and identity. 'Words are your business, boy. Not just the Word. Words are everything' 'Tell me what happened while there's still time,' demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate black baptist minister he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young orphan, Sunraider was taken in and raised by Hickman, before reinventing himself as a racist politician. Now, as the two men confront the truth about their shared past in a final reckoning, Ellison's masterly novel takes in memories of a southern childhood, the rhythms of jazz and gospel and the richness of the African-American experience. 'Majestic' Toni Morrison

New editions of three foundational texts, the Tao Te Ching, the Dhammapada, and the Bhagavad Gita.

Raw, lyrical and blazing with intensity, these short stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man. 'He saw the dark bird glide into the sun and glow like a bird of flaming gold' Ranging from the Jim Crow South to a Harlem bingo parlour, from the hobo jungles of the Great Depression to Wales during the Second World War, they all display the musically layered voices, soaring language and sheer ebullience that made Ellison a giant of twentieth-century American writing. Written early in Ellison's career, several of these fourteen stories were unpublished in his lifetime, including 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' which features in this collection for the first time. 'Approach the simple elegance of Chekhov' Washington Post

This absorbing collection of letters spans a decade in the lifelong friendship of two remarkable writers who engaged the subjects of literature, race, and identity with deep clarity and passion.

The correspondence begins in 1950 when Ellison is living in New York City, hard at work on his enduring masterpiece, Invisible Man, and Murray is a professor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Mirroring a jam session in which two jazz musicians "trade twelves"—each improvising twelve bars of music around the same musical idea-their lively dialog centers upon their respective writing, the jazz they both love so well, on travel, family, the work literary contemporaries (including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway) and the challenge of racial inclusiveness that they wish to pose to America through their craft. Infused with warmth, humor, and great erudition, Trading Twelves offers a glimpse into literary history in the making—and into a powerful and enduring friendship.