In this wise, beguiling, beautiful novel set in the era of the Civil War, an award-winning playwright and author paints a haunting portrait of a woman named Always, born a slave, and four generations of her African-American family.

J. California Cooper returns with a sweeping novel about love and heartbreak, perseverance and luck, telling her tale with an insight and grace that reaffirms Alice Walker’s words of praise for her previous works: “Her sty...

Back in print after more than five years, this is the extraordinary first short story collection by the author of Family.

The folk flavor of her storytelling has earned her  constant comparison to Langston Hughes and Zora  Neale Hurston, but through four collections of  short stories and two novels, J. California Cooper  has proven that hers is a...

Whether through her stories or her legendary readings, J. California Cooper has an uncanny ability to reach out to readers like an old and dear friend.  Her characters are plain-spoken and direct: simple people for whom life, despit...

J.California Cooper writes with a transparent clarity and such exuberant energy that her characters leaop off the page, bursting with the stories they've got to tell--stories of simple people, stories of families and fate, of love and...

A fourth collection of stories by the award-winning author.

In one of the best-loved volumes of her work, J. California Cooper tells exuberant tales full of wonder at the mystery of life and the hardness of fate. Awed, bedeviled, bemused, all of Cooper's characters are borne up by the sheer po...

Like the small towns J. California Cooper has so vividly portrayed in her previous novels, Wideland, Oklahoma, is home to ordinary Americans with big hearts. Among them are newlyweds Irene and Val, who graciously allow their neighbors...

J. California Cooper’s irresistible collection of new stories explores the universal themes of romance, family, and the hopes that propel people’s dreams. In “As Time Goes By” a young woman singlemindedly pursu...