Set against the backdrop of the French and Indian War in the 1750s, this book expands on the legend of Babimose. The legend was passed down as an oral history among Indigenous peoples until it was recorded by a traveling historian who was among the northern Wisconsin Ojibwe in the 1850s. The story recalls a gifted Anishinaabe boy who lived south of Gichigami, now known as Lake Superior, who independently traveled among Indigenous nations. The original story was recorded as a one-page description of Babimose; this book expands on this to explore the language barriers and cultural differences that Babimose would have encountered on his journey. The lessons he learned about people and their resilience in the region still offer lessons for readers today.

Drawing on the author’s experiences, this debut novel follows an interracial blended family living in Chicago in the 1990s.
 
James Stewart III’s powerful debut novel documents the life of a working-class interracial couple and their children in a Chicago suburb in the early 1990s. The father, Jim, is a Black man married to Connie, a white woman with two white sons from a previous marriage. Connie and Jim have three more children together, and the entire family lives in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a well-to-do, predominantly white community.

Defiant Acts follows the Stewarts through a year in which Jim fights to earn a promotion, the adolescent boys struggle to find themselves, one of the younger children becomes gravely ill, and the parents try to stay afloat in a shaky economy. Within the walls of the Stewarts’ home, race doesn’t factor, but when the family interacts with the outside world, it is inescapable, a basis for identity and inclusion as well as a spur for exclusion and abuse.

Rooted in the tradition of Black authors from Chicago and drawing on the author’s own experiences, Defiant Acts eschews a conventional plot, presenting a series of captured moments—past and present—and multiple perspectives to build a mosaic of the family’s lives. In clear, concise prose, Stewart focuses on the complexities of human relationships and on race relations both in and outside the domestic space, placing emphasis on the values that bind this tight-knit family together: solidarity, care, and hope.

Longlisted for the 2025 Nigeria Prize for Literature

A 2024 Foreword INDIES Finalist

Set in a fictional town, at a fictional school, Linda N. Masi’s debut novel, Fine Dreams, rewrites myth and history. Framed by a ghost’s first-person narrative, the book centers on four young friends, the stars of their school’s track team. While studying for exams, they are kidnapped and taken to a terrorist encampment. Two are claimed as “wives” by their captors, one is forced to wear a suicide vest, and each is subjected to appalling violence and terror. While their stories resonate with a widely publicized 2014 abduction, these four young women could have been taken in any of the many incidents that have plagued the Nigerian people for years.

Even though they are abducted and abused by men in power and forced to survive in a dark place like Persephone, Masi’s protagonists offer new endings for Persephone’s story. In Masi’s telling, these resilient young women recover their dreams and hopes to live in daylight once again. No matter where they travel or where they stay, they gain self-determination and reclaim their dreams.

After a security guard is found dead and another wounded at the Children’s Museum of Science and History in Norman, Oklahoma, Detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Chris Pierson are summoned to investigate. They find no fingerprints, no footprints, and no obvious means to enter the locked building.

Monique discovers that a portion of an ancient and deformed skeleton had also been stolen from the neglected museum archives. Her uncle, the spiritual leader Leroy Bear Red Ears, concludes that the stolen remains are those of Hatak haksi, a witch and the matriarch of the Crow family, a group of shape-shifting Choctaws who plan to reestablish themselves as the powerful creatures they were when the tribe lived in Mississippi. Monique, Leroy, and Chris must stop the Crows, but to their dread, the entities have retreated to the dark and treacherous hollow in the center of Chalakwa Ranch. The murderous shape-shifters believe the enormous wild hogs, poisonous snakes, and other creatures of the hollow might form an adequate defense for Hatak haksi.

But what no one counts on is the unexpected appearance and power of the Old Ones who guard the lands of the Choctaw afterlife. Blending tribal beliefs and myths into a modern context, The Hatak Witches continues the storyline of Choctaw cosmology and cultural survival that are prominent in Devon A. Mihesuah’s award-winning novel, The Roads of My Relations.
 

By the end of the twentieth century, Adrian C. Louis had become one of the most powerful voices in the canon of Native American literature. Skins, his best-known work, is now offered by the University of Nevada Press with a new foreword by David Pichaske.

It’s the early 1990s and Rudy Yellow Shirt and his brother, Mogie, are living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, home of the legendary Oglala Sioux warrior Crazy Horse. Both Vietnam veterans, the men struggle with daily life on the rez. Rudy, a criminal investigator with the Pine Ridge Public Safety Department, must frequently arrest his neighbors and friends, including his brother, who has become a rez wino.

But when Rudy falls and hits his head on a rock while pursuing a suspected murderer, Iktome the trickster enters his brain. Iktome restores Rudy’s youthful sexual vigor—long-lost to years of taking high blood pressure pills—and ignites his desire for political revenge via an alter ego, the “Avenging Warrior.” As the Avenging Warrior, Rudy takes direct action to punish local criminals. In a violent act, he torches the local liquor store, nearly burning Mogie alive while he is hiding on the store’s roof, plotting to steal booze. Although the brothers reconcile before Mogie dies, he leaves the Avenging Warrior with one final mission: go to Mount Rushmore and blow the nose off George Washington’s face.

Louis’s critically acclaimed novel was made into a movie in 2002, directed by Chris Eyre.

Niizh Eshkanag is a member of the first generation of Anishinaabe children required to attend a U.S. government boarding school—schools infamously intended to “kill the Indian and save the man,” or forcibly assimilate Native students into white culture. At the Yardley Indian Boarding School in northern Minnesota, far from his family, Niizh Eshkanag endures abuse from the school staff and is punished for speaking his native language. After his family moves him to a school that is marginally better, he meets Roger Poznanski, the principal’s white nephew, who arrives to live with his uncle’s family and attend the school. Though Roger is frightened of his Indian classmates at first, Niizh Eshkanag befriends him, and they come to appreciate and respect one another’s differences. When a younger Anishinaabe student runs away into a winter storm after being beaten by a school employee, Niizh Eshkanag and Roger join forces to rescue him, beginning an adventure that change their lives and the way settlers, immigrants and the Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes think about each other and their shared future.