Black Sugar

Described as a 'beautifully crafted tale' by The Irish Times, Black Sugar is a magical realist fable about greed and corruption in Venezuela by prize-winning author Miguel Bonnefoy. ‘One of the beautiful surprises of this autumn’ L'Express On the edge of the Latin American rainforest, the Oteros family farm sugar cane in their remote corner of the earth. Cut off entirely from the modern world, life is peaceful, uneventful. Until, that is, a succession of ships arrive in search of Henry Morgan’s legendary lost treasure, said to be buried deep beneath the forest floor. Soon, the isolated villagers are exposed to all the trappings of modernity, while the travellers’ search for booty unearths more than anybody could have anticipated…

In this incendiary debut collection, activist and poet Cicely Belle Blain intimately revisits familiar spaces in geography, in the arts, and in personal history to expose the legacy of colonization and its impact on Black bodies. They use poetry to illuminate their activist work: exposing racism, especially anti-Blackness, and helping people see the connections between history and systemic oppression that show up in every human interaction, space, and community. Their poems demonstrate how the world is both beautiful and cruel, a truth that inspires overwhelming anger and awe -- all of which spills out onto the page to tell the story of a challenging, complex, nuanced, and joyful life. In Burning Sugar, verse and epistolary, racism and resilience, pain and precarity are flawlessly sewn together by the mighty hands of a Black, queer femme. This book is the second title to be published under the VS. Books imprint, a series curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya, featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of color. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

Ira Brown Harkeys Black Sugar is an unusual novel set in history, based on the surviving facts of the life of one of the Souths most dynamic businessmen in the 19th and 20th centuries, General Jean (John) Baptiste Levert. General Leverts story is told through the actual people who helped make it happen his parents, children and grandchildren, descendants of his brothers and life-long friends, house servants, business associates and their descendants, detractors and admirers alike. Drawing on previously unknown material including the Generals correspondence and business records and letters and scrapbooks in possession of his descendants, along with stories passed down by generations of the Levert family Harkey serves up a gumbo with the right ingredients for a delicious character study of a complicated man from birth to death his youth, schooling, Civil War experiences, Reconstruction troubles, business career, and relationships with his large family, business partners, servants, and women: A man who rose from a plantation in Louisiana sugarcane country to a pinnacle of success and fortune in post-Civil War New Orleans, to found an empire that thrives today; whose bravura and identity as a patriarch, southern gentleman, risk-taker, robber baron, and mythic lover, were surpassed only by his business genius, by his power in growing sugar, marketing, land development, and plantation ownership, each an integral component of New Orleans and Louisiana economy and history. With keen insight and intimacy, Harkey captures the passions and obsessions that consumed General Levert, the fierce devotions and ego that fired his imagination and propelled him to succeed at all costs: He set out after the Civil War to build his fortune, letting nothing stand in his way, until an unexpected, unlikely event late in his life. Harkey gives us detailed drama of the Generals childhood on a sugar plantation; of his often ruthless, high-pressure business practice and conduct; of his love for his wife; of his prominence in New Orleans civic, financial and social life; and of the almost vengeful determination with which he cast himself as a money-hungry figure that gilded through elegant French Quarter restaurants, company board rooms, and plantation house parlors in search of the perfect business deal. Here also is a look at the sugar industry and the business of growing and manufacturing sugar in Louisiana from its earliest days beginning before the Civil War.

“Brenda Shaughnessy’s poems bristle with imperatives: ‘confuse me, spoon-feed me, stop the madness, decide.’ There are more direct orders in her first few pages than in six weeks of boot camp...Only Shaughnessy’s kidding. Or she is and she isn’t. If you just want to boss people around, you’re a control freak, but if you can joke about it, then your bossiness is leavened by a yeast that’s all too infrequent in contemporary poetry, that of humor.”—New York Times “Shaughnessy’s voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy.”—Harvard Review “Brenda Shaughnessy . . . writes like the love-child of Mina Loy and Frank O’Hara.”—Exquisite Corpse "In its worried acceptance of contradiction, its absolute refusal of sentimentality and its acute awareness of time's 'scarce infinity,' this is a brilliant, beautiful and essential continuation of the metaphysical verse tradition." —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Human Dark with Sugar is both wonderfully inventive (studded with the strangenesses of ‘snownovas’ and ‘flukeprints’) and emotionally precise. Her ‘I’ is madly multidexterous—urgent, comic, mischievous—and the result is a new topography of the debates between heart and head.”—Matthea Harvey, a judge for the Laughlin Award "Seriously playful, sexy, sharp-edged, and absolutely commanding throughout....Here you'll meet an 'I' boldly ready to take on the world and just itching to give 'You' some smart directives. So listen up."—Library Journal In her second book, winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award, Brenda Shaughnessy taps into themes that have inspired era after era of poets. Love. Sex. Pain. The heavens. The loss of time. The weird miracle of perception. Part confessional, part New York School, and part just plain lover of the English language, Shaughnessy distills the big questions into sharp rhythms and alluring lyrics. “You’re a tool, moon. / Now, noon. There’s a hero.” Master of diverse dictions, she dwells here on quirky words, mouthfuls of consonance and assonance—anodyne, astrolabe, alizarin—then catches her readers up short with a string of powerful monosyllables. “I’ll take / a year of that. Just give it back to me.” In addition to its verbal play, Human Dark With Sugar demonstrates the poet’s ease in a variety of genres, from “Three Sorries” (in which the speaker concludes, “I’m not sorry. Not sorry at all”), to a sequence of prose poems on a lover’s body, to the discussion of a disturbing dream. In this caffeine jolt of a book, Shaughnessy confirms her status as a poet of intoxicating lines, pointed, poignant comments on love, and compelling abstract images —not the least of which is human dark with sugar. Brenda Shaughnessy was raised in California and is an MFA graduate of Columbia University. She is the poetry editor for Tin House and has taught at several colleges, including Eugene Lang College and Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Soon to be a Hulu Original series • The internationally acclaimed author of Wild collects the best of The Rumpus's Dear Sugar advice columns plus never-before-published pieces. Rich with humor and insight—and absolute honesty—this "wise and compassionate" (New York Times Book Review) book is a balm for everything life throws our way. Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills—and it can be great: you’ve had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar—the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild—is the person thousands turn to for advice.

The Matador Negro Azucar (Black Matador, Sugar), is the story of a young African-American man, born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, who is obsessed by the idea of becoming a matador. Chester Simmons is opposed by his parents. Bullfighting!? Get serious about yourself, Chester! Dondisha Phillips, the kindergarten teacher who loves him, Chester, you could get hurt messin around with those bulls. Chester trips to Mexico City. He spends time in the projects called Tlaltelolco before he does an espontaneo/jumps into the bullring during a fight in the Plaza Mexico. He does four suicidal passes and is taken under the wing of an unscrupulous promoter, -- re-named Matador, Juan Negro, Azucar. Seor Flores holds him as an indentured servant/bullfighter until Maya de las Reyes, the great Mexican artist, bails him out. He returns to Chicago to work under his father in Gelmans Electronic Affairs. He uses his knowledge of the bullfight to create a bullfighting video game (funded by Mr. Gelman) that makes him a wealthy twenty some year old. Whenever he is asked about his year as a Matador, he answers, I lit my fire, I greased my skillet and I cooked.

Included in this book are instructions on how to make reindeer, Father Christmas, Mrs Claus, an assortment of elves and fairies and much more. It contains step-by-step instructions and helpful photographs to help you begin your sugarcraft journey and create lovely sugary things to decorate your home and cakes this Christmas!