Works by
Touré
(Writer)

The Portable Promised Land: Stories (2002)
This inspired collection of stories is cause for celebration. With stunning language and dazzling characters, Touré introduces Soul City-a wholly imagined utopia where magic happens and black is beautiful. In a broad range of characterization and styles, The Portable Promised Land is filled with lighthearted humor and heavyhearted issues. Touré challenges form and what's considered politically correct in stories like The Sad, Sweet Story of Sugar Lips Shinehot and Afrolexicolgy Today's Bi-Annual List of the Top 50 Words in African America.

The Portable Promised Land marks the entrance of a new and wildly compelling voice to fiction.

Soul City (2004)
Welcome to Soul City, where roses bloom in the cracks of the sidewalk, musical genres become political platforms, and children use their allowance money to buy records from the Vinyl Man. Its an unusually peaceful and magical American community with a strong heritage and sense of unity at least, that's how journalist Cadillac Jackson first finds it when he visits the city for a magazine story. It isn't long before a mayoral campaign turns hostile; Cadillac falls hard for Mahogany Sunflower and is taught how to shed his embattled African-American identity so that he, too, might become a resident of this fabled city. What he discovers reveals as much about himself as it does about human nature and the meaning of race in America.

Never Drank the Kool-Aid: Essays (2006)
His name is Touré --just Touré--and like many of the musicians, athletes, and celebrities hes profiled, he has affected the way that we think about culture in America. He has profiled Eminem, 50 Cent, and Alicia Keys for the cover of Rolling Stone. He's played high-stakes poker with Jay-Z and basketball with Prince and Wynton Marsalis. In Touré's world, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. sits beside Condoleezza Rice who sits beside hip-hop pioneer Tupac Shakur, and all of them are fascinating company. Never Drank the Kool-Aid is the chronicle of Touré's unparalleled journey through the American funhouse called pop culture. Its rooms are filled with creative, arrogant, kind, ordinary, and extraordinary people, most of whom happen to be famous. It is Touré's  gift to be able to see through the artifice of their world and understand the genuine motivations behind their achievements -- to see who they truly are as people. This is a searingly funny, surprisingly unguarded, and deeply insightful look at a world few of us comprehend.