EsoWon Books Service List

About Us

• Who We Are

  • Eso Won Bookstore

    an essential Los Angeles destination in the heart of historic Leimert Park. EsoWon has played host to a plethora of authors Neely Fuller,Jr., Frances Cress Welsing, Barack Obama, Elaine Brown, Bill Clinton, Michelle Alexander, John Henrik Clarke, Terry McMillan, Bill Cosby, Patti LaBelle, Spike Lee, Maya Angelou, William Kuntsler, Yolanda King, Stokely Carmichael, Isabel Wilkerson, Rodney King, Bebe Moore Campbell, BB King, Rachel Robinson, Amos Wilson, Cupcake Brown, Walter Mosley, Connie Rice, Berry Gordy, Jr., and the phenomenal woman herself Ms. Ruby Dee.

  • 'EsoWon' (African for “water over rocks”) is a living proverb as it provides fluid, safe, stirring opportunities that flow to a reservoir of knowledge for all people to experience.

Current Books we are Reading

• Current Books we are Reading

  • EsoWon's staff and friends are always reading some kind of interesting book.

    We are in our own little way trying to keep this time honored tradition from becoming obsolete. The following titles are some of what the staff and What Are You Reading? Book Club participants discussed. If you are at all interested in becoming a participant please contact Eso Won Bookstore or join us every third Saturday of the month at 7PM in the bookstore.

What's New In Paperbacks

• What's New In Paperbacks

  We restock paperback on a weekly basis hopefully this will make it easier to keep up with some of the new titles.

  • Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-First Century

    "Black Stats"-a comprehensive guide filled with contemporary facts and figures on African Americans-is an essential reference for anyone attempting to fathom the complex state of our nation. With fascinating and often surprising information on everything from incarceration rates, lending practices, and the arts to marriage, voting habits, and green jobs, the contextualized material in this book will better attune readers to telling trends while challenging commonly held, yet often misguided, perceptions. A compilation that at once highlights measures of incredible progress and enumerates the disparate impacts of social policies and practices, this book is a critical tool for advocates, educators, and policy makers. "Black Stats" offers indispensable information that is sure to enlighten discussions and provoke debates about the quality of Black life in the United States today-and help chart the path to a better future. There are less than a quarter-million Black public school teachers in the U.S.-representing just 7 percent of all teachers in public schools. Approximately half of the Black population in the United States lives in neighborhoods that have no White residents. In the five years before the Great Recession, the number of Black-owned businesses in the United States increased by 61 percent. A 2010 study found that 41 percent of Black youth feel that rap music videos should be more political. There are no Black owners or presidents of an NFL franchise team. 78 percent of Black Americans live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant, compared with 56 percent of White Americans.

    $14.95

  • Leimert Park (Paperback)

    Leimert Park, one of the first comprehensively planned communities in Southern California, was founded and developed in 1927 by Walter H. Leimert Sr. and designed by Olmsted Brothers, a firm headed by sons of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., the master planner of New York City's Central Park. In its early years, Leimert Park was a pasture situated on portions of the Rancho Cienega O Paso de la Tijera, once owned by land baron E.J. "Lucky" Baldwin. The area is best known for its gracefully curved tree-lined streets, Spanish Colonial and Mediterranean-style homes, and Art Deco buildings designed by some of the nation's foremost architects. Famous residents Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, and Los Angeles's first African American mayor, Tom Bradley, have called Leimert Park home. In 1967, artists Alonzo and Dale Davis founded Brockman Gallery, and with this beginning, a new era of Leimert Park as an arts and cultural center dawned. Today, with its art galleries, jazz and blues clubs, coffeehouses, performance spaces, restaurants, and Afrocentric fashion and merchandise shops, the area has evolved into one of Los Angeles's great idyllic communities.

    $21.99

  • The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

    2014 NAACP Image Award Winner: Outstanding Literary Work - Biography / Auto Biography, 2013 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Choice Top 25 Academic Titles for 2013. The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks examines her six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement, Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who, with a single act, birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis provides a revealing window into Parks’s politics and years of activism. She shows readers how this civil rights movement radical sought - for more than a half a century - to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.

    $17.50

  • The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss

    When James Meredith enrolled as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi in 1962, the resulting riots produced more casualties than any other clash of the civil rights era. Eagles shows that the violence resulted from the university's and the state's long defiance of the civil rights movement and federal law. Ultimately, the price of such behavior-the price of defiance-was not only the murderous riot that rocked the nation and almost closed the university but also the nation's enduring scorn for Ole Miss and Mississippi. Eagles paints a remarkable portrait of Meredith himself by describing his unusual family background, his personal values, and his service in the U.S. Air Force, all of which prepared him for his experience at Ole Miss.

    $29.95

  • Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy

    From the editors of the groundbreaking anthology Love, InshAllah comes a provocative new exploration of the most intimate parts of Muslim men’s lives. Muslim men are stereotyped as either oversexed Casanovas willing to die for seventy-two virgins in heaven or controlling, big-bearded husbands ready to rampage at the hint of dishonor. The truth is, there are millions of Muslim men trying to figure out the complicated terrain of love, sex, and relationships just like any other American man. In Salaam, Love, Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi provide a space for American Muslim men to speak openly about their romantic lives, offering frank, funny, and insightful glimpses into their hearts - and bedrooms. The twenty-two writers come from a broad spectrum of ethnic, racial, and religious perspectives - including orthodox, cultural, and secular Muslims - reflecting the strength and diversity of their faith community and of America. By raising their voices to share stories of love and heartbreak, loyalty and betrayal, intimacy and insecurity, these Muslim men are leading the way for all men to recognize that being open and honest about their feelings is not only okay - it’s intimately connected to their lives and critical to their happiness and well-being.

    $16.00

  • The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

    IT BEGAN WITH A TANTALIZING, ANONYMOUS EMAIL: “I AM A SENIOR MEMBER OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY.” What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man. Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of the United States government. His whistleblowing has shaken the leaders of nations worldwide, and generated a passionate public debate on the dangers of global monitoring and the threat to individual privacy. In a tour de force of investigative journalism that reads like a spy novel, award-winning Guardian reporter Luke Harding tells Snowden’s astonishing story - from the day he left his glamorous girlfriend in Honolulu carrying a hard drive full of secrets, to the weeks of his secret-spilling in Hong Kong, to his battle for asylum and his exile in Moscow. For the first time, Harding brings together the many sources and strands of the story - touching on everything from concerns about domestic spying to the complicity of the tech sector - while also placing us in the room with Edward Snowden himself. The result is a gripping insider narrative - and a necessary and timely account of what is at stake for all of us in the new digital age.

    $14.95

  • Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965

    After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, southern white backlash seemed to explode overnight. However, Jason Morgan Ward argues that southern conservatives began mobilizing against civil rights some years earlier, when the New Deal politics of the mid-1930s threatened the monopoly on power that whites held in the South. Ward uncovers a parallel history of segregationist opposition that mirrors the new focus on the long civil rights movement.

    $24.95

  • The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford

    In the 1920s, Henry Ford hired thousands of African American men for his open-shop system of auto manufacturing. In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford, Beth Tompkins Bates explains how black Detroiters, newly arrived from the South, seized the economic opportunities offered by Ford in the hope of gaining greater economic security. As these workers came to realize that Ford's anti-union "American Plan" did not allow them full access to the American Dream, their loyalty eroded, and they sought empowerment by pursuing a broad activist agenda. This, in turn, led them to play a pivotal role in the United Auto Workers' challenge to Ford's interests. In the process, Henry Ford and his company helped kindle the civil rights movement in Detroit without intending to do so.

    $27.95

  • Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms

    Chronicling the underappreciated black tradition of bearing arms for self-defense, this book presents an array of examples reaching back to the pre - Civil War era that demonstrate a willingness of African American men and women to use firearms when necessary to defend their families and communities. From Frederick Douglass’s advice to keep “a good revolver” handy as defense against slave catchers to the armed self-protection of Monroe, North Carolina, blacks against the KKK chronicled in Robert Williams’s Negroes with Guns, it is clear that owning firearms was commonplace in the black community. Nicholas Johnson points out that this story has been submerged because it is hard to reconcile with the dominant narrative of nonviolence during the civil rights era. His book, however, resolves that tension by showing how the black tradition of arms maintained and demanded a critical distinction between private self-defense and political violence. Johnson also addresses the unavoidable issue of young black men with guns and the toll that gun violence takes on many in the inner city. He shows how complicated this issue is by highlighting the surprising diversity of views on gun ownership in the black community. In fact, recent Supreme Court affirmations of the right to bear arms resulted from cases led by black plaintiffs. Surprising and informative, this well-researched book strips away many stock assumptions of conventional wisdom on the issue of guns and the black freedom struggle.

    $19.95

  • Freedom's Children: The 1938 Labor Rebellion and the Birth of Modern Jamaica

    This is the first comprehensive history of Jamaica's watershed 1938 labor rebellion and its aftermath. The rebellion produced two rival leaders who dominated the political life of the colony through the achievement of independence in 1962. Alexander Bustamante, a moneylender, founded the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union and its progeny, the Jamaica Labour Party. Norman Manley, an eminent barrister, led the struggle for self-government and with others established the People's National Party. Palmer sheds new light on the nature of Bustamante's collaboration with the imperial regime, the rise of the trade-union movement, the struggle for constitutional change, and the emergence of party politics in a modernizing Jamaica.

    $39.95

  • My Work Is That of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver

    George Washington Carver (ca. 1864–1943) is at once one of the most familiar and misunderstood figures in American history. In My Work Is That of Conservation, Mark D. Hersey reveals the life and work of this fascinating man who is widely - and reductively - known as the African American scientist who developed a wide variety of uses for the peanut. Carver had a truly prolific career dedicated to studying the ways in which people ought to interact with the natural world, yet much of his work has been largely forgotten. Hersey rectifies this by tracing the evolution of Carver’s agricultural and environmental thought starting with his childhood in Missouri and Kansas and his education at the Iowa Agricultural College. Carver’s environmental vision came into focus when he moved to the Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama, where his sensibilities and training collided with the denuded agrosystems, deep poverty, and institutional racism of the Black Belt. It was there that Carver realized his most profound agricultural thinking, as his efforts to improve the lot of the area’s poorest farmers forced him to adjust his conception of scientific agriculture. Hersey shows that in the hands of pioneers like Carver, Progressive Era agronomy was actually considerably “greener” than is often thought today. My Work Is That of Conservation uses Carver’s life story to explore aspects of southern environmental history and to place this important scientist within the early conservation movement.

    $24.95

  • The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease

    A powerful account of how cultural anxieties about race shaped American notions of mental illness. The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia - for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s - and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America.

    $27.50

  • African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee

    $24.95

  • Brother and the Dancer

    $15.00

  • The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

    A New York Times Notable Book, An NPR Best Book of the Year, A Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year. In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd, swept up by the tides of the Great Migration, flees Georgia and heads north. Full of hope, she settles in Philadelphia to build a better life. Instead she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment, and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins are lost to an illness that a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children, whom she raises with grit, mettle, and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them to meet a world that will not be kind. Their lives, captured here in twelve luminous threads, tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage - and a nation's tumultuous journey.

    $15.95

  • This Is How You Lose Her

    Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz’s first book, Drown, established him as a major new writer with “the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet” (Newsweek). His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was named #1 Fiction Book of the Year” by Time magazine and spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, establishing itself – with more than a million copies in print - as a modern classic. In addition to the Pulitzer, Díaz has won a host of major awards and prizes, including the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award. Now Díaz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love – obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness-and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in the New York Times-Bestselling This Is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that “the half-life of love is forever.”

    $16.00

  • The 21-Day Financial Fast: Your Path to Financial Peace and Freedom

    Financial Peace and Freedom in 21 Days In The 21-Day Financial Fast, award-winning writer and The Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary proposes a field-tested financial challenge. For twenty-one days, participants will put away their credit cards and buy only the barest essentials. With Michelle s guidance during this three-week financial fast, you will discover how to: Break bad spending habits Plot a course to become debt-free with the Debt Dash Plan Avoid the temptation of overspending for college Learn how to prepare elderly relatives and yourself for future long-term care expenses Be prepared for any contingency with a Life Happens Fund Stop worrying about money and find the priceless power of financial peace As you discover practical ways to achieve financial freedom, you ll experience what it truly means to live a life of financial peace and prosperity. Thousands of individuals have participated in the fast and as a result have gotten out of debt and become better managers of their money and finances. The 21-Day Financial Fast is great for earners at any income-level or stage of life, whether you are living paycheck-to-paycheck or just trying to make smarter financial choices."

    $15.99

  • Americanah

    One of The New York Times's Ten Best Books of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. An NPR "Great Reads" Book, a Chicago Tribune Best Book, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Seattle Times Best Book, an Entertainment Weekly Top Fiction Book, a Newsday Top 10 Book, and a Goodreads Best of the Year pick. A powerful, tender story of race and identity by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun. Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion - for each other and for their homeland.

    $15.95

  • Black Male(d): Peril and Promise in the Education of African American Males

    $29.95

  • Change If I Can You Can: Changing for the Better in You

    CHANGE: If I Can You Can is the story of a man destined for as much turmoil as life can provide. Travis Angry created his identity through childhood rebellion, dropping out of school, being in the military, fighting cancer, marrying, divorcing, raising children as a single father, obtaining a college degree, writing a memoir, and working as a professional speaker. Angry’s gift is showing others how to resolve fear. His mission is to help teenagers, parents, teachers, coaches, and youth group directors to understand their lives and use hope as a tool for positive change.

    $17.95

  • "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

    Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children - which has sold more than a quarter-million copies to date - is a paradigm-shifting, highly acclaimed exploration of the cultural slippage between white teachers and students of color. In her long-awaited and now bestselling second book, "Multiplication Is for White People," the award-winning educator reflects on the last fifteen years of reform efforts - including No Child Left Behind, standardized testing, alternative teacher certification paths, and the charter school movement - that have left a generation of poor children of color feeling that higher educational achievement is not for them. Hailed as "illuminating" (Publishers Weekly), "thought-provoking" (Harvard Educational Review), and a "much-needed review of the American educational system" (Kirkus Reviews), "Multiplication Is for White People" is a passionate reminder that there is no achievement gap at birth. Poor teaching, negative stereotypes, and a curriculum that does not adequately connect to poor children’s lives conspire against the prospects of poor children of color. From K-12 classrooms through the college years, Delpit brings the topic of educating other people’s children into the twenty-first century, outlining a blueprint for raising expectations based on a simple premise: that all aspects of advanced education are for everyone. Praise for "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children.

    $17.95

  • SigHT: Unveiling Black Student Achievement and the Meaning of Hope

    Revealing the methods successful black students employ to achieve greatness, this study gives positive perspectives from a markedly difficult environment. Many questions are explored, including "How do black students become successful leaders if teachers have low expectations? When faced with a boring curriculum, what can be done to foster enthusiasm and interest in the subject matter? How can black students excel if lesson plans are not congruent with their learning style? If the school is headed by an ineffective principal, what can be done? "and "How can black students perform to their utmost in a demoralizing school culture?" The answers in this examination replace despondence with optimism and provide educators, parents, and students with strategies of hope.

    $16.95

  • Why Are So Many Black Men in Prison?

    African-American males are being imprisoned at an alarming and unprecedented rate. Out of the 10.4 million Black adult males in the U.S. population, nearly 1.5 million are in prisons and jails with another 3.5 million more on probation or parole or who have previously been on probation or parole. Black males make up nearly 75% of the total prison population, and due to either present or past incarceration is the most socially disenfranchised group of American citizens in the country today. This book details the author's personal story of a negligent upbringing in an impoverished community, his subsequent engagement in criminal activity (drug dealing), his incarceration, and his release from prison and experiencing of the crippling social disenfranchisement that comes with being an ex-felon. The author then relates his personal experiences and realizations to the seminal problems within the African-American community, federal government, and criminal justice system that cause his own experiences to be the same experiences of millions of other young Black men. "Why Are So Many Black Men in Prison?" will not only scrutinize specific longstanding problems and certain cultural misgivings within the African-American community, but will also confront how deliberate actions on the part of the federal government and several elected politicians over the past 2 decades paved the way for this crisis to occur and evolve into the present situation where millions of Black men are experiencing social disenfranchisement due to mass criminalization, incarceration, and a faulty criminal justice system. The author identifies and expounds upon three basic problems that are the causative factors behind themass criminalization and incarceration of African-American males, and provides conclusive supportive facts and statistics to substantiate these identifications. The three problems identified are: (1) Irresponsible and negligent actions on the part of African-Americans, both individually and collectively, past and presently (2) A criminal justice system that has been formulated and designed for the purposes of maintaining a highly visible permanent criminal class within The United States citizenry (3) Racism and an element of right wing White supremacist-minded leadership that has found a way to modernly "re-enslave" and neutralize a large portion of the African-American population through drug proliferation, poverty, miseducation, criminalization and incarceration, and misuse of the law and the criminal justice system, and that has skillfully hidden their agenda by utilizing "political correctness" and a well crafted scheme that uses the law and the law-making process to create and promote an unjust social order. It is the author's aim to display to the reader very clear facts about this crisis of Black male criminalization and disenfranchisement; its origin, development, purpose, and it's affects in terms of how it is stifling all of the other areas of development for African-Americans, and what steps that can be undertaken in order to curb and eventually annihilate this problem. This book also has information that can serve as a guideline for African-Americans on how to change their longstanding position as a basically powerless and dependant minority to a more independent and powerful group within the American and world power structure.

    $14.00

  • Solutions for Dysfunctional Family Relationships: Couples Counseling, Marriage Therapy, Crosscultural Psychology, Relationship A

    $12.99

  • Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

    Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award. One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year. Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy.

    $23.00

  • Africa: Mother of Western Civilization

    In lecture/essay format, Dr. Ben identifies and corrects myths about the inferiority and primitiveness of the indigenous African peoples and their descendants. Order Africa Mother of Western Civilization here.

    $34.95

Upcoming Events

• Jakobi Williams Booksigning

  $34.95. From the bullet to the ballot the illinois chapter of the black panther party and racial coalition politics in chicago. Start: 05/29/2014 7:00 pm

  • In this comprehensive history of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party (ILBPP)

    Chicago native Jakobi Williams demonstrates that the city's Black Power movement was both a response to and an extension of the city's civil rights movement. Williams focuses on the life and violent death of Fred Hampton, a charismatic leader who served as president of the NAACP Youth Council and continued to pursue a civil rights agenda when he became chairman of the revolutionary Chicago-based Black Panther Party. Framing the story of Hampton and the ILBPP as a social and political history and using, for the first time, sealed secret police files in Chicago and interviews conducted with often reticent former members of the ILBPP, Williams explores how Hampton helped develop racial coalitions between the ILBPP and other local activists and organizations

  • Williams also recounts the history of the original Rainbow Coalition, created in response to Richard J.

    Daley's Democratic machine, to show how the Panthers worked to create an antiracist, anticlass coalition to fight urban renewal, political corruption, and police brutality. Come early and enjoy the discussion

• Bryant Terry Booksigning Afro-vegan

  $27.50. AFRO-VEGAN: Farm-Fresh African, Caribbean and Southern Flavors Re-mixed. Start: 05/31/2014 5:00 pm

  • African, Caribbean, and Southern food are all known and loved as vibrant and flavor-packed cuisines.

    In Afro-Vegan, renowned chef and food justice activist Bryant Terry reworks and remixes the favorite staples, ingredients, and classic dishes of the African Diaspora to present wholly new, creative culinary combinations that will amaze vegans, vegetarians, and omnivores alike

  • Blending these colorful cuisines results in delicious recipes like Smashed Potatoes

    Peas, and Corn with Chile-Garlic Oil, a recipe inspired by the Kenyan dish irio, and Cinnamon-Soaked Wheat Berry Salad with dried apricots, carrots, and almonds, which is based on a Moroccan tagine. Creamy Coconut-Cashew Soup with Okra, Corn, and Tomatoes pays homage to a popular Brazilian dish while incorporating classic Southern ingredients, and Crispy Teff and Grit Cakes with Eggplant, Tomatoes, and Peanuts combines the Ethiopian grain teff with stone-ground corn grits from the Deep South and North African zalook dip. There’s perfect potluck fare, such as the simple, warming, and intensely flavored Collard Greens and Cabbage with Lots of Garlic, and the Caribbean-inspired Cocoa Spice Cake with Crystallized Ginger and Coconut-Chocolate Ganache, plus a refreshing Roselle-Rooibos Drink that will satisfy any sweet tooth

  • With more than 100 modern and delicious dishes that draw on Terry’s personal memories as well as the history of food that has traveled from the African continent

    Afro-Vegan takes you on an international food journey. Accompanying the recipes are Terry’s insights about building community around food, along with suggested music tracks from around the world and book recommendations. For anyone interested in improving their well-being, Afro-Vegan’s groundbreaking recipes offer innovative, plant-based global cuisine that is fresh, healthy, and forges a new direction in vegan cooking. Come early and enjoy the feast.

• Jervey Tervalon Booksigning

  $24.99. Monster's chef: a novel. Start: 06/11/2014 7:00 pm

  • From award-winning

    Los Angeles Times bestselling author Jervey Tervalon comes a highly clever, twisting tale of suspense involving drugs, perverse sex, and poisonous celebrity worship, in which a man trying to rebuild his life becomes entangled in dangerous and deadly circumstances

  • Once upon a time

    Gibson was a successful chef with a popular restaurant and a beautiful loving wife. He was also a drug addict with a habit that nearly destroyed him

  • Fresh out of rehab, he’s now using his skills to feed his fellow halfway house residents budget gourmet meal

    a talent that attracts two shady women who offer him a job cooking for a music superstar named Monster. Though Gibson doesn’t have a good feeling about his seeming good fortune, he needs a job.

  • Arriving on Monster’s compound, Gibson senses that trouble is still on his tail.

    First, he’s asked to sign a confidentiality agreement. Then he meets the compound’s gardener, who warns him not to go outside at night—and tells him that to stay alive he must see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing.

  • It is advice that proves all too true when Gibson discovers a dead body near his bungalow a few nights later.

    Suddenly, all hell is breaking loose and Gibson is at the center. Now he has to figure out how to escape this terrifying nightmare and whether he can. Come early and enjoy the discussion.

• Toni Ann Johnson

  Remedy for a broken angel: a novel. Start: 06/12/2014 7:00 pm

  • Serena is a Bermudan jazz singer whose demons lead her to abandon her daughter Artie.

    Artie's anger eventually drives her to Serena's younger lover, Jamie L'Heureux, a jazz superstar. The spirit of Charles Mingus thrums throughout the story as these two women tangle in a syncopated mother-daughter relationship. Come early and enjoy the evening.

  • Location

    4327 Degnan Blvd, Los Angeles, California, 90008, United States

• Rachel Howzell Hall

  Land Of Shadows: A Detective Elouise Norton Novel. Start: 06/18/2014 7:00 pm

  • Along the ever-changing border of gentrifying Los Angeles

    a teenage girl is found hanged at a construction site. Homicide detective Elouise "Lou" Norton's partner assumes it's a suicide. Lou isn't buying the easy explanation. For one thing, the site is owned by millionaire Napoleon Crase, the man who may have murdered Lou's sister thirty years ago. As Lou investigates she uncovers undeniable links between the two cases. Come early and enjoy the discussion

  • Location

    4327 Degnan Blvd Los Angeles, California 90008 United States