All Books

Availability

Price

$
$

More filters

  • Family Spirit : A Novel

    Diane McKinney-Whetstone

    $26.99

    The eccentric Mace family believes that the Philadelphia rowhouse they’ve lived in for decades is built on sacred ground, and that the space enhances the clairvoyance passed down to them through generations. But developers, viewing the family’s lifestyle an impediment to gentrification efforts, begin a campaign to displace them. Meanwhile, a prodigal daughter’s return deepens family schisms and exposes betrayals. Can she also help them battle the havoc, both internal and external, that would ruin them?

    The Maces believe that a clairvoyant gene, they refer to as the knowing, has been passed down in their family to at least one girl child in every generation from as far back as they can trace—they claim Harriet Tubman in their family tree. Main character Lil, considered the most gifted of her generation, has returned to Philadelphia for cancer treatment. Lil is painfully estranged from her mother and aunts and cousins. Decades ago, after too much brandy and cocaine, Lil acquiesces to her boyfriends’ request to prove her clairvoyance by advising him on a business venture. Doing so, Lil violates a sacred family code because the Maces believe a knowing is an act of community where they agree through storytelling and rituals that invoke the ancestors, that their prognostications contribute to a greater good. Lil’s boyfriend benefits from her breach of faith and in an act of gratitude—and exploitation—books Lil on the Mike Douglass show. Lil’s mother and grandmother are mortified as they watch Lil predict trivialities in a game-like format for some fawning white man, making a mockery of their sacrosanct practice. They sever all contact with Lil and ban her from the family home.

    Lil becomes a media darling for a time after her appearance on The Mike Douglas Show, and since then has been paid handsomely as a consultant, advisor, counselor, coach, or similar titles that legitimate entities use to obscure that they’re paying for fortunetelling.

    Lil has remained close with her brother Miles and when she returns to Philadelphia, settles into the chaos of his household. Miles is an aspiring novelist in search of a book deal; Mile’s wife Jetta, a once local model, is now trying her hand at interior decorating. Jetta and Miles are teetertottering on Bankruptcy, their marriage is disintegrating, and they can’t agree on how to help their twenty-one-year-old daughter Ayana work through her issues. Lil offers Miles and Jetta money and advice, but she primarily concentrates on Ayana in whom she recognizes her younger self.

    Ayana is back home with her parents following an abysmal six years trying to finish college. After a dearth of girl babies on her father’s side, she feels pressured to manifest and carry on the family gift. She’s conflicted. Her entire life, her mother, who doesn’t believe in a clairvoyant gene, has tried to persuade Ayana that she is not like the Maces. Though Ayana craves a normal life and wishes Jetta was right, she knows that she is very much like her father’s people. Plus, she adores them with their unapologetic authenticity, and color-clashing outfits, and free-standing crinkly hair.  She loves the stories her grandmother tells about the ancestors, bringing them to life. She especially loves the rituals.

    Still, Ayana pretends to her family that the knowing gene has bypassed her, disappointing her grandmother and aunts, greatly relieving her mother, and causing Ayana enormous guilt. She distracts herself from the guilt by jumping in and out of relationships. Her latest guy lives in his car.

    More complications arise for Ayana when she thinks she experiences a knowing about Lil’s treatment and doesn’t want to out herself by exposing it.

    Meanwhile, the man who exploited Lil years ago has also returned to Philly after a lucrative run as a Black man purveying anti-Black rhetoric. He again contacts Lil for help. As appalled as she is by his brazenness, she considers his appeal an opportunity to right her past wrong and pave a way back home to her mother. She tussles with whether and how to bring him down as she prepares to start her cancer treatment. Ayana begs her to get a second opinion, and Lil relents and discovers the radiologist’s error, and Ayana’s deceit.

    Ayana’s unhoused boyfriend learns through his internship with a gentrifying housing development corporation that a campaign is underway to remove Ayana’s grandmother, aunts, and cousins from the home they’ve occupied for decades. The threat fuels the internal struggles of the main characters. Ayana, just trying to live a normal life, and Lil, just trying to keep living, become a formidable duo in the climactic battle to save the family home, their block, their culture, and their traditions.

    Each chapter of Family Spirit opens with a text message thread that captures the chapter’s focus—hence the title Family Spirit. Told in an omniscient voice, and primarily set in the current day, Family Spirit dips into the past with depictions of enslaved ancestors through the stories Ayana’s grandmother tells.

  • Waterline : A Novel

    Aram Mrjoian

    $28.00

    Outside Detroit on the island of Gross Ile, the Kurkjians learn that Mari, the eldest of their youngest generation, has swum into the depths of Lake Michigan—a suicide that reverberates throughout the family and lays bare the deeply rooted pain that is their legacy.

    More than a century earlier, Gregor, the Kurkjian’s larger-than-life patriarch, survived the Armenian Genocide after fighting for his freedom atop Musa Dagh. Decades later and miles away, Gregor’s epic mythos looms large over his descendants’ lives. As these Kurkjians contend with Mari’s devastating loss, secrets and shortcomings rise to the surface, forcing each of them to decide where their own story fits in the narrative of the family’s fraught history.

    For fans of Tommy Orange’s There, There, Thao Thai’s Banyan Moon, and Jeffrey Eugenides epic Middlesex, Waterline explores the complex, unexpected beauty of diaspora, the weight of inherited trauma, and the echoes of the genocide on contemporary Armenian life. Aram Mrjoian brilliantly creates a searing portrait of a family afloat in grief as it struggles to find the perseverance needed to rise above.

  • Mounted : On Horses, Blackness, and Liberation

    Bitter Kalli

    $22.00

    Joining the growing Black creative movement currently refashioning horses and cowboy imagery, a thoughtful, probing exploration of the shared history of Blackness and horses which reveals what its image can teach us about nationhood, race, and culture.

    Drawing on their personal history as a former urban equestrian, Black queer person, and child of Jamaican and Filipino immigrants, essayist and art critic Bitter Kalli contends the horse should be regarded as a critical source of power and identity in Black life.

    In a series of astute essays, Kalli explores the work of Black artists and influencers from Beyoncé to filmmakers Tiona Nekkia-McClodden and Jeymes Samuel and explores their own life-long relationship to equines. Alternatively playful and critical, meditative and biting, these essays navigate time and place—from the shadows of racetracks where jockey culture and the ubiquity of “equestrian chic” was born, to the reclamation—or, in Lil Nas X’s word, yeehawification—of the image of the cowboy, to the fraught connections of equestrian sport to slavery, US militarization, and European colonial domination. At heart, Kalli probes a central question: What does it mean for Black people to ride and tend horses in the context of a culture that has also used horses against them?

    Throughout these essays, Kalli reflects on the experience of being the only Black member of the equestrian team at Columbia University, and how the aesthetics, ethos, and practice of horse stewardship contributed to their understanding of gender, sexuality, and radical community building. Mounted moves beyond the reductive stereotypes that dominate our perceptions of “horse people”—the swaggering masculinity, snooty elitism, and assumed whiteness—to reveal how Black people relate to the image and physical presence of the horse in nature and culture, considering violence, sexualization, power, migration, and more through its image.

  • David Hammons

    David Hammons

    Sold out

    Hammons' body prints, flags and found-object sculptures come together in this artist's book documenting his thought-provoking conceptual exhibition

    This post-exhibition catalog revisits David Hammons’ 2019 show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. A singular book created entirely under the artist’s direction, this publication illustrates the most expansive exhibition of this legendary artist’s work to date.
    Said critic Jonathan Griffin of the original exhibition, "Alongside finished artworks, including framed examples of Hammons’s sublime drawings made with bounced basketballs and powdered Kool-Aid, there are plenty of apparently ad hoc, readymade interventions, installations in which it is unclear where one ends and the next begins. … Hammons, it seems, wants his viewers to relax, historiography be damned."
    Born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois, David Hammons moved to Los Angeles in 1963 at the age of 20 and began making his body prints several years later. He studied at Otis Art Institute with Charles White and became part of a younger generation of Black avant-garde artists loosely associated with the Black Arts Movement. In Los Angeles, Hammons was a cofounder of Studio Z, a group which included Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Joe Ray and others. Hammons has lived in New York since 1978.

  • John Wilson: Witnessing Humanity

    Jennifer Farrell

    Sold out

    Through paintings, sculptures, drawings and more, John Wilson's work foregrounds the human experience and refuses invisibility

    American artist John Wilson was not only a master draftsman, printmaker, painter and sculptor active for over seven decades, but he was also a keen observer and social activist. In his representations of Black Americans in particular, he sought to pay homage to the beauty and truths of ordinary Black people in such a way that all viewers, across race and culture, might see themselves reflected. His multidisciplinary works include unflinching representations of racial violence and war, tender family portraits, monumental bronze heads and landmark commissions such as the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., which stands in the United States Capitol.
    The first major retrospective of the artist’s work, Witnessing Humanity sheds light on Wilson’s life and artistic evolution. Reproductions of artworks and photographs accompany critical essays and personal reflections, including analyses by art historians, interviews with Wilson’s peers, remembrances from fellow Black creatives and a full chronology by the late artist’s gallerist. The varied voices which resonate through this catalog illustrate that it is long past time to recognize Wilson’s art―to celebrate his lifelong dedication to depicting what he described as the "reality of being Black in this impossible world."
    John Woodrow Wilson (1922–2015) was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University. He lived in Mexico for five years and became a friend and colleague of artist Elizabeth Catlett. Wilson taught fine art at Boston University from 1964 until 1986.

  • THING

    Robert Ford

    $35.00

    A full facsimile reproduction of the era-defining queer magazine that documented Chicago’s Black nightlife scene of the early ’90s

    Started in 1989 by designer and writer Robert Ford, THING magazine was the voice of Chicago’s queer Black music and arts scene in the early 1990s. Ford and his editors were part of the burgeoning house music scene, which originated in Chicago’s queer underground, and some of the top DJs and musicians from that time were featured in the magazine, including Frankie Knuckles and RuPaul. THING published 10 issues from 1989 to 1993, before it was cut short by Ford’s death from HIV/AIDS-related causes.
    While THING primarily focused on music, it also opened its pages to a wide range of subjects: poetry and gossip, fiction and art, interviews and polemics. The AIDS crisis loomed large in its contents, particularly in the personal reflections and practical resources that it published. In a moment when the gay community was besieged by the AIDS crisis and a wantonly cruel government, the influence and significance of this cheaply produced newsprint magazine vastly exceeded its humble means, presenting a beautiful portrait of the ball and club cultures that existed in Chicago with deep intellectual reflections. THING was a publication by and for its community, and understood the fleetingness of its moment.
    To reencounter this work today is to reinstate the Black voices who were so central to the history of AIDS activism and queer and club culture, but which were often sidelined by white queer discourse. This volume collects all 10 editions of this iconic magazine.

  • The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery

    Vincent Brown

    $28.00

    Winner of the Merle Curti Award
    Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize
    Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize
    Longlisted for the Cundill Prize

    “Vincent Brown makes the dead talk. With his deep learning and powerful historical imagination, he calls upon the departed to explain the living. The Reaper’s Garden stretches the historical canvas and forces readers to think afresh. It is a major contribution to the history of Atlantic slavery.”―Ira Berlin

    From the author of Tacky’s Revolt, a landmark study of life and death in colonial Jamaica at the zenith of the British slave empire.

    What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper’s Garden, Vincent Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America―and a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force.

    In this compelling and evocative story of a world in flux, Brown shows that death was as generative as it was destructive. From the eighteenth-century zenith of British colonial slavery to its demise in the 1830s, the Grim Reaper cultivated essential aspects of social life in Jamaica―belonging and status, dreams for the future, and commemorations of the past. Surveying a haunted landscape, Brown unfolds the letters of anxious colonists; listens in on wakes, eulogies, and solemn incantations; peers into crypts and coffins, and finds the very spirit of human struggle in slavery. Masters and enslaved, fortune seekers and spiritual healers, rebels and rulers, all summoned the dead to further their desires and ambitions. In this turbulent transatlantic world, Brown argues, “mortuary politics” played a consequential role in determining the course of history.

    Insightful and powerfully affecting, The Reaper’s Garden promises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond.

  • Toward Eternity : A Novel

    Anton Hur

    $16.99

    In a near-future world, a new therapy promises to eradicate cancer by entirely replacing the body’s cells with nanites—android cells that not only cure those afflicted but also render patients virtually immortal. When literary researcher Yonghun—himself a recipient of nanotherapy—teaches an AI named Panit how to understand poetry, he creates a living, thinking machine. But when Yonghun mysteriously vanishes into thin air and then just as suddenly reappears, the event raises disturbing questions. What happened to Yonghun, and, though he’s returned, is he really himself anymore?

    When Dr. Beeko, the scientist who holds the patent to the nanotherapy technology, learns of Panit, she transfers his consciousness from the machine into an android body, giving him freedom and life. As Panit and other immortals thrive—and begin to replicate—their development will lead them to a crossroads and a choice with existential consequences.

    Toward Eternity explores the unexpected consequences of progress, what we really have to fear from technology and the future, and how love and the resilience of memory might survive even the end of humanity.

  • My Father's House : An Ode to America's Longest-Serving Black Congressman

    John Conyers III

    $29.99

    In this moving work, part clear-eyed assessment, part memoir, the son of iconic African American Congressman John Conyers Jr. shines a spotlight on his father and his political legacy, and reveals how, as his son, he eventually learned to leverage his own voice in a world that his father helped create.

    A respectful, thoughtful, yet clear-eyed reframing of a national hero’s personal and political odyssey, My Father’s House is John Conyers III's love letter to his father and a record of his own journey. Conyers reveals a towering figure in modern American political history and an ordinary family man; a leader whose work in Washington necessitated his many absences as a father from a son coming of age in Detroit.

    John Conyers III introduces us to John James Conyers, Jr. the legislator, who changed lives and made history, and of his equity-focused work that remains to be done. We meet Conyers the politician and mentor who worked with and counselled a network of powerbrokers—often from the family home on Seven Mile Road in the Motor City—including President Bill Clinton, Congressmen Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Charlie Rangel, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, feminist Gloria Steinem, entertainer-activists Harry Belafonte, Berry Gordy, Stevie Wonder, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Chris Tucker and a slew of other players in Washington, DC, and across the nation.

    A resonant political, historical, and family story, My Father’s House explores how John James Conyers, Jr., was at once a man of deep and abiding spiritual faith, human talents, and human weaknesses. As he places his father among this land's greatest lawmakers, he also demystifies and grounds the Civil Rights giants of that era, reminding us of their noble yet deeply flawed humanity. This exploration of John James Conyers, Jr., told through John Conyers III's eyes and experiences, is essential to a thorough understanding of modern U.S. politics and the cultures and human lives it continues to shape.

    My Father’s House includes a black-and-white photo insert.

  • Archive of Unknown Universes : A Novel

    Ruben Reyes Jr.

    $28.00

    Cambridge, 2018. Ana and Luis’s relationship is on the rocks, despite their many similarities, including their mothers who both fled El Salvador during the war. In her search for answers, and against her best judgement, Ana uses The Defractor, an experimental device that allows users to peek into alternate versions of their lives. What she sees leads her and Luis on a quest through Havana and San Salvador to uncover the family histories they are desperate to know, eager to learn if what might have been could fix what is.

    Havana, 1978. The Salvadoran war is brewing, and Neto, a young revolutionary with a knack for forging government papers, meets Rafael at a meeting for the People's Revolutionary Army. The two form an intense and forbidden love, shedding their fake names and revealing themselves to each other inside the covert world of their activism. When their work separates them, they begin to exchange weekly letters, but soon, as the devastating war rages on, forces beyond their control threaten to pull them apart forever.

    Ruben Reyes Jr.’s debut novel is an epic, genre-bending journey through inverted worlds—one where war ends with a peace treaty, and one where it ends with a decisive victory by the Salvadoran government. What unfolds is a stunning story of displacement and belonging, of loss and love. It’s both a daring imagining of what might have been and a powerful reckoning of our past.

  • Sounds Like Joy

    Yesenia Moises, Yesenia Moises (Illustrated by)

    $19.99

    A little mermaid explores the magical feeling of playing and creating with fishy friends in Sounds Like Joy, a colorful underwater picture book and essential read-aloud from Yesenia Moises, illustrator of tennis Olympian Serena Williams’s The Adventures of Qai Qai!

    One day, Joy finds something unexpected on the ocean reef. When she shakes it, it makes a brand-new noise!

    Soon, she and her aquatic animal friends are dancing to the beat and feeling amazing . . . until her “jingle-jangle” loses a few important pieces and stops making the special sound she loves.

    The little mermaid’s friends spring into action with some creative noisemaking to cheer her up! How can they use what they have under the sea to make the sound she’s missing?

  • Girl Scouts: Anika and the Great Dog Rescue : A Girl Scout Novel

    Sayantani DasGupta, Girl Scouts

    $9.99

    Following Maven Takes the Lead, this second paperback original in the Girl Scouts middle grade fiction series stars Anika, a member of the troop with a passion for animals. In the vein of The Babysitter's Club and American Girl's Girl of the Year series!

    Anika loves animals.

    She loves bird-watching in her backyard, volunteering at the animal shelter with her Girl Scout troop, and caring for her elderly neighbor’s parrot. Anika wants a pet, but her parents have a long list of reasons to say no, including that they aren’t sure Anika is up for the responsibility.

    When Anika discovers a stray dog in her neighbor’s backyard, she decides to take charge all on her own. Between friend fights at school and her mom working harder than ever, Anika could use the distraction. This is something she wants to handle herself. But then the pup doesn’t show up for a few days, and Anika is worried something is wrong. With time running out, it’s up to Anika to build a web of support strong enough to bring the dog to safety. 

  • The Other Side of Imani

    Lisa Springer

    $18.99

    Front Desk meets That Girl Lay Lay in this coming-of-age middle grade story about Imani, a thirteen-year-old aspiring designer who creates a virtual avatar to compete for a spot at a prestigious arts school after she discovers that a viral influencer has stolen her designs. 

    Ever since she could remember, thirteen-year-old Imani has wanted to be a fashion designer.

    But fashion designers are bold, out-there, and in your face. And despite her unique sense of style, Imani has trouble fitting in, let alone standing out. Entering her school’s design competition for a scholarship to the nearby arts high school seems like the perfect way to make new friends and get closer to her dream of being a designer.

    Then Imani’s designs are stolen by one of her classmates, and Imani is forced to enter the competition anonymously, under a virtual persona, “Estelle.” When Estelle goes viral, Imani must figure out how to be her “real” self as she makes new friends and finds her voice—all while hoping to win the competition.  

    A story about finding your voice alongside your real self, The Other Side of Imani is a heartfelt, fresh, and powerful middle grade contemporary debut that’s perfect for fans of A Soft Place to Land and Just Right Jillian.

  • The Forest Demands Its Due

    Kosoko Jackson

    $15.99

    A queer Black teen discovers the sinister, deadly history of his boarding school and the corrupt powers behind it all in this page-turning dark academia/horror YA novel that’s A Lesson in Vengeance meets The Taking of Jake Livingston. A USA Today bestseller!

    Regent Academy has a long and storied history in Winslow, Vermont, as does the forest that surrounds it. The school is known for molding teens into leaders, but its history is far more nefarious than any outsider could begin to suspect.  

    Seventeen-year-old Douglas Jones wants nothing to do with Regent's king-making; he’s just trying to survive. But then a student is murdered and for some reason, by the next day, no one remembers him having ever existed, except for Douglas and the groundskeeper's son, Everett Everley. In his determination to uncover the truth, Douglas awakens a horror hidden within the forest, unearthing secrets that have been buried for centuries. A vengeful creature wants blood as payment for a debt more than three hundred years in the making—or it will swallow all of Winslow in darkness.

    And for the first time in his life, Douglas might have a chance to grasp the one thing he’s always felt was missing: power. But if he’s not careful, he will find out that power has a tendency to corrupt absolutely everything.

  • Wannabe : Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me

    Aisha Harris

    $18.99

    In nine lively essays, critic Aisha Harris invites us into the wonderful, maddening process of making sense of the pop culture we consume.

    Aisha Harris, cohost of NPR’s beloved Pop Culture Happy Hour, has made a name for herself as someone you can turn to for a razor- sharp take on whatever show or movie everyone is talking about. Now, she turns her talents inward, mining the benchmarks of her nineties childhood and beyond to analyze the tropes that are shaping all of us, and our ability to shape them right back.

    In the opening essay, an interaction with Chance the Rapper prompts an investigation into the origin myth of her name. Elsewhere, Aisha traces the evolution of the “Black Friend” trope from its Twainian origins through to the heyday of the Spice Girls, teen comedies like She’s All That, and sitcoms of the New Girl variety. And she examines the overlap of taste and identity in this era, rejecting the patriarchal ethos that you are what you like. Whatever the subject, sitting down with her book feels like hanging out with your smart, hilarious, pop culture–obsessed friend—and it’s a delight.

  • Zara in the Middle

    Erika Lynne Jones, Erika Lynne Jones (Illustrated by)

    $19.99

    Acclaimed artist Erika Lynne Jones's author-illustrator debut picture book! A young girl named Zara would rather say she doesn't know what she wants than choose between her two grandmothers' ideas.

    Zara loves living next door to her Grandma Jane and Granny Gladys, but sometimes it’s tough being stuck in the middle of them! Both her grandmas think they know what’s best for her, and Zara is worried she might upset them if she says what she really wants.

    Find out what it will take for Zara to speak up for herself in this multigenerational story about finding your voice and the strength of family.

  • PRE-ORDER: Nervous : Essays on Heritage and Healing

    Jen Soriano

    $19.99

    PRE-ORDER: On Sale: August 26, 2025

    We all carry history in our bodies.

    In her twenties and early thirties, Jen Soriano spent hours lying awake at night, her sleep disturbed by pain that seemed to have no cause. Eventually, she received a collection of diagnoses: C-PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, peripheral neuralgia, mild dystonia, and social anxiety disorder. Soriano realized that these were all conditions that affect the nervous system. What could have caused these nervous system disturbances in the first place? And why was her own father, a neurosurgeon, unable to help?

    Many stories about trauma, mental illness, and chronic pain focus solely on individual paths to healing. In fourteen lyrical essays traversing centuries and continents, Soriano widens the lens to show how we can move from isolated trauma to a networked web of trauma wisdom. Nervous unflinchingly examines legacies of war, racism, colonization, and migration, and navigates both the human body and the body politic by centering neurodiverse, disabled, and genderqueer bodies of color within larger systems that have harmed and silenced them for generations. With Nervous, Soriano boldly invites us along on a watershed journey toward healing, collective safety, and communion.

  • Midnight Rooms : A Novel

    Donyae Coles

    $19.99

    Set in a foreboding Gothic mansion and infused with the heightened paranoia and creeping horror, a spine-chilling debut historical thriller from a fresh voice in the genre that will leave you questioning who, or what, you can trust . . . including your own sanity.

    A mysterious suitor. A secluded manor. And a heroine’s quest to uncover the mysteries hidden within its haunted halls.

    England, 1840. The orphaned daughter of a white man and a Black woman—an outsider with no fortune or connections—Orabella Mumthrope never expected to marry, until Elias Blakersby, the scion of a fabulously wealthy family, arrives at her uncle’s home, declaring a deep desire to make Orabella his wife. 

    The new bride is quickly whisked away to Korringhill Manor, the Blakersby family estate where she is shocked to find decay, skittish servants, and curt elders. Despite Elias’s assurances, Orabella becomes increasingly unsettled. There is a darkness deep within this house. Rooms are kept locked or hidden away, and the walls seem to thrum with secrets. Orabella has little freedom, and soon, the darkness begins to engulf her, too. She suffers fitful sleep filled with macabre dreams, is awakened by blood-curdling screams, and rises from her bed covered in mysterious bruises. 

    Confused and terrified, she begins to question where her dreams end and reality begins. The longer Orabella stays in this place, the more she loses parts of herself. . . . How long until she no longer exists?

  • Positive Obsession : The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler

    Susana M. Morris

    $29.99

    A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work. 

    As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion. 

    In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories. 

    Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.” 

  • Be the Light : How She Became Angela Davis

    Daria Peoples, Daria Peoples (Illustrated by)

    $19.99

    Acclaimed author-artist Daria Peoples illuminates the life of civil rights icon Angela Davis in this strikingly illustrated picture book biography. This profound exploration of American history, activism, the civil rights movement, and the power of the people is for fans of Maya's Song, Nina and There Was a Party for Langston. Includes backmatter.

    Before she was an iconic civil rights activist, before she was one of the FBI’s Most Wanted, before she was a teacher, Angela Davis was a young girl in Birmingham, Alabama. A girl whose parents taught her that freedom lives anywhere and everywhere it pleases. A girl who believed it when her mother told her, “It won’t always be this way.” And a girl who grew up to fight for the world and the future that she imagined could exist—for all people.

    In this resonant and timely picture book biography of Angela Davis, acclaimed author-artist Daria Peoples invites young readers to join the fight. Her striking paintings and powerful text pay tribute to Angela Davis’s evolution as an abolitionist and dare readers of all ages to light the way to the future. An inspiring choice for fans of books by Kwame Alexander, Kadir Nelson, Christian Robinson, and Carole Boston Weatherford. Features extensive back matter, including a timeline of Angela Davis’s life, a visual glossary, and an author’s note.

  • I Can't Even Think Straight

    Dean Atta

    $19.99

    From the Stonewall Award–winning author of The Black Flamingo comes a new novel in verse, in which a biracial young man confronts issues of race, class, and sexuality.

    Kai knows who he is to others: the reliable grandson, the best friend, the romantic backup. But he doesn’t quite know who he is to himself.

    Though Kai desperately wants to come out at school, he keeps himself closeted. His best school friend, Matt, who is also queer, is afraid of getting kicked out by his religious parents if they knew—so he stays closeted and asks Kai to do the same. Kai unhappily goes along with it, but when a rumor goes around that Kai and Matt are together, Matt starts acting differently toward Kai anyway.

    Kai’s other best friend, Vass, is nonbinary and doesn’t care who knows it. Vass feels that Matt is a negative influence, putting a damper on Kai’s identity—but maybe that’s just Vass’s crush on Kai talking. Caught between his best friends, Kai turns to writing to express his emotions. But when he explodes, he puts everything at risk.

  • Ty’s Travels: Super Ty!

    Kelly Starling Lyons, Niña Mata (Illustrated by)

    $5.99

    A Geisel Honor–winning series! Ty uses his imagination and super powers to help others in this Ty's Travels My First I Can Read Series.

    Ty loves superheroes. He watches them on TV and reads books about them.

    When he puts on a cape and a mask, he becomes Super Ty! Super Ty helps Momma and others. But even his super skills can’t solve all problems by himself. That’s what Ty’s super friend is for—his brother!

    Join Ty on his imaginative adventures in Ty's Travels: Super Ty, a My First I Can Read book by acclaimed author and illustrator team Kelly Starling Lyons and Niña Mata. Imagination, helpfulness, and play are highlighted, making this perfect for sharing with children three to six.

  • Tempest

    K. Ibura

    $19.99

    Inspired by YA debut author K. Ibura’s own upbringing in New Orleans, this is a beautifully written and lyrical contemporary novel with magical elements. Perfect for fans of A Song Below Water and Shadowshaper.

    After her parents passed away in Hurricane Katrina, Veronique (a.k.a. V) moved to her MawMaw’s house in the Louisiana countryside. MawMaw always said that Veronique needed to hide her control and power over the wind, but one day, she has to use it to save a neighbor’s son from drowning. To protect Veronique, her MawMaw immediately sends her to live with an aunt in New Orleans.

    But NOLA is nothing like Veronique could have imagined—she’s finally attending traditional school, she gets to bond with cousins that she’s never met, and she even rides on her first highway. Though she quickly falls in with a group of friends at school—and one boy who she’d like to be more than her friend—there’s also a higher risk of discovery in the city. When one of her cousin's friends figures out the truth, V learns about a secret organization called the Vaunted, a group that comes after people with elemental magic and recruits them for their own environmental rebellion.

    Now that Veronique is on their radar, the Vaunted is closing in quickly, and V is forced on the run to hide from their sinister intentions. V’s left with two major questions: Can she trust anyone? And will she ever get a chance to be a normal girl again?

  • First Day Around the World

    Ibi Zoboi, Juanita Londoño (Illustrated by)

    Sold out

    From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and artist Juanita Londoño, this lyrical celebration of the first day of school across every continent explores what going back to school looks like for children in countries around the world!

    How do children around the world spend their first day of school?

    Some eat warm akara for breakfast in Nigeria, while others unwrap lunches of kluski in Poland. In China, they practice intricate characters in special notebooks, and in Argentina, they learn each other's names in a singsong memory game. No matter where in the world, every student has something new to look forward to on their first day!

    From Ethiopia to Germany to India to Brazil, this lyrical text introduces young readers to the breakfast-to-bedtime routines, cultures, and landscapes that connect people across all continents.

     

  • The Road to the Salt Sea : A Novel

    Samuel Kolawole

    $18.99

    A searing exploration of the global migration crisis that moves from Nigeria to Libya to Italy, from an exciting new literary voice.

    Able God works for low pay at a four-star hotel, where he must flash a smile for wealthy guests. When not tending to the hotel’s overprivileged clientele, he muses over self-help books and the game of chess.

    But Able’s ordinary life is upended when an early morning room service order leads him to Akudo, a sex worker involved with a powerful but dan- gerous hotel guest. Caught in a web of violence, guilt, and fear, Able must run to save himself—a journey that leads him into the desert with a group of drug-addled migrants, headed by charismatic religious leader Ben Ten. The travelers’ dream of reaching Europe—and a new life—shatters when they fall prey to human traffickers and find them- selves fighting for their freedom.

    As Able God moves into the treacherous unknown, the foundations of his beliefs are forever altered. Suspenseful, incisive, and illuminating, The Road to the Salt Sea is a story of family, fate, religion, survival, and what often happens to those who seek their fortunes elsewhere.

  • Toni at Random : The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship

    Dana A. Williams

    $29.99

    An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature.

    A multifaceted genius, Toni Morrison transcended her role as an author, helping to shape an important period in American publishing and literature as an editor at one of the nation’s most prestigious publishing houses. While Toni Morrison's literary achievements are widely celebrated, her editorial work is little known. Drawing on extensive research and firsthand accounts, this comprehensive study discusses Morrison's remarkable journey from her early days at Random House to her emergence as one of its most important editors. During her tenure in editorial, Morrison refashioned the literary landscape, working with important authors, including Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest, and Lucille Clifton, and empowering cultural icons such as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali to tell their stories on their own terms.

    Toni Morrison herself had great enthusiasm about Dana Williams's work on this story, generously sharing memories and thoughts with the author over the years, even giving her the book's title. From the manuscripts she molded, the authors she nurtured, and the readers she inspired, Toni at Random demonstrates how Toni Morrison has influenced American culture beyond the individual titles or authors she published. Morrison’s contribution as an editor transformed the broader literary landscape and deepened the cultural conversation. With unparalleled insight and sensitivity, Toni at Random charts this editorial odyssey.

  • One Crazy Summer: The Graphic Novel

    Rita Williams-Garcia, Sharee Miller (Illustrated by)

    $15.99

    The Newbery Honor Book, National Book Award finalist, and Coretta Scott King Award–winning novel about the three unforgettable Gaither sisters, now adapted into a beautiful full-color graphic novel with vibrant art by Sharee Miller

    “I wish I didn’t know that I was marching my sisters into a boiling pot of trouble cooking in Oakland.…”

    Eleven-year-old Delphine is like a mother to her two younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern. She's had to be, ever since their mother, Cecile, left them seven years ago for a radical new life in California.

    But when the sisters arrive from Brooklyn to spend the summer with their mother in Oakland, Cecile is nothing like they imagined. While the girls hope to go to Disneyland and meet Tinker Bell, their mother sends them to a day camp run by the Black Panthers.

    Unexpectedly, Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern learn much about their family, their country, and themselves during one truly crazy summer.

    This graphic novel adaptation of Rita Williams-Garcia's beloved Newbery Honor and National Book Award finalist novel is brought to life with Sharee Miller’s vibrant color and engaging art. Perfect for fans of graphic novel adaptations of classics like The Crossover and The Giver.

  • One Summer in Miami

    Amber Rose Gill

    $18.99

    Kya’s work is her life. She graduated from a rigorous engineering programme at MIT and landed a highly competitive job at one of the best tech firms in Silicon Valley. She even runs a whole online community empowering women in tech.

    It’s not great, then, that she’s just been unceremoniously sacked mid-flight en route to a much-needed holiday in Miami.

    So Kya heads straight to the trendiest bar in town in search of tequila shots and a spot of Destiny’s Child. What she finds instead is the extremely cool, extremely hot, might be an actual angel Jade Quinn – the hottest DJ on Miami’s nightlife scene. Quinn’s life couldn’t be further from Kya’s, but maybe a taste of something different is just what she needs…

  • I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (American Century Series)

    Langston Hughes

    $20.00

    In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s.

    His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. It is the continuously amusing, wise revelation of an American writer journeying around the often strange and always exciting world he loves.

  • The Big Sea (American Century Series)

    Langston Hughes

    $20.00

    "This book is the chronicle of a bright and lively artistic ear that brought the African-American people full into the twentieth century. It is a wonderful book!” ―Amiri Baraka

    In his incisive introduction to The Big Sea, an American classic, Arnold Rampersad writes: "This is American writing at its best--simpler than Hemingway; as simple and direct as that of another Missouri-born writer...Mark Twain."

    Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet--at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance."

  • The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

    Carol Anderson

    $18.00

    From the New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, an unflinching, critical new look at the Second Amendment and how it has been engineered to deny the rights of African Americans since its inception-now with a new introduction and afterword from the author.

    In The Second, historian and award-winning, bestselling author of White Rage Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.

    From the seventeenth century, when it was encoded into law that the enslaved could not own, carry, or use a firearm whatsoever, until today, with measures to expand and curtail gun ownership aimed disproportionately at the African American population, the right to bear arms has been consistently used as a weapon to keep African Americans powerless--revealing that armed or unarmed, Blackness, it would seem, is the threat that must be neutralized and punished.

    Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second. Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.

  • Kinning (Everfair, 2)

    Nisi Shawl

    $18.99

    Named a Best Fantasy and Sci-Fi Book of The Year by Elle!

    Nominated for the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel!

    Kinning, the sequel to Nisi Shawl’s acclaimed debut novel Everfair, continues the stunning alternate history where barkcloth airships soar through the sky, varied peoples build a new society together, and colonies claim their freedom from imperialist tyrants.

    The Great War is over. Everfair has found peace within its borders. But our heroes’ stories are far from done.

    Tink and his sister Bee-Lung are traveling the world via aircanoe, spreading the spores of a mysterious empathy-generating fungus. Through these spores, they seek to build bonds between people and help spread revolutionary sentiments of socialism and equality―the very ideals that led to Everfair’s founding.

    Meanwhile, Everfair’s Princess Mwadi and Prince Ilunga return home from a sojourn in Egypt to vie for their country’s rule following the abdication of their father King Mwenda. But their mother, Queen Josina, manipulates them both from behind the scenes, while also pitting Europe’s influenza-weakened political powers against one another as these countries fight to regain control of their rebellious colonies.

    Will Everfair continue to serve as a symbol of hope, freedom, and equality to anticolonial movements around the world, or will it fall to forces inside and out?

Stay Informed. We're building a community committed to celebrating Black authors + artisans. Subscribe to keep up with all things Kindred Stories.