*ships in 7 -10 business days*

Hot Comb offers a poignant glimpse into Black women’s lives and coming of age stories as seen across a crowded, ammonia-scented hair salon while ladies gossip and bond over the burn. The titular story “Hot Comb” is about a young girl’s first perm—a doomed ploy to look cool and to stop seeming “too white” in the all-black neighborhood her family has just moved to. In “Virgin Hair” taunts of “tender-headed” sting as much as the perm itself. It’s a scenario that repeats fifteen years later as an adult when, tired of the maintenance, Flowers shaves her head only to be hurled new put-downs. The story “My Lil Sister Lena” traces the stress resulting from being the only black player on a white softball team. Her hair is the team curio, an object to touched, a subject to be discussed and debated at the will of her teammates, leading Lena to develop an anxiety disorder of pulling her own hair out. Among the series of cultural touchpoints that make you both laugh and cry, Flowers recreates classic magazine ads idealizing women’s needs for hair relaxers and product. “Change your hair form to fit your life form” and “Kinks and Koils Forever” call customers from the page.

Latrice Richardson is a thirty eight year old divorced, single mother who has an amazing career and a wonderful eight year old son named Quincy. What she doesn't have is any semblance of a love life and sex is non-existent. After a scorching one night stand with a handsome stranger, Nathan Woodson, Latrice never expects to see him again, and definitely not at the front of her son's classroom!
Nathan Woodson is a former foster kid who loves teaching and has just landed his dream job. The last thing he expected was the sexy enchantress he spent the night with, to be the mother of one of his students.
Despite the two of them both trying to keep things professional, Latrice and Nathan find themselves being drawn closer together. But with nosey school moms on the prowl and his job on the line, they find that love may be too hot for this parent and teacher to handle.
Hot for Teacher is a sexy rom-com that features an older woman/younger man, (somewhat) secret lovers and plenty of high heat.

It is Paris, 1815. An extraordinarily shaped South African girl known as the Hottentot Venus, dressed only in feathers and beads, swings from a crystal chandelier in the duchess of Berry’s ballroom. Below her, the audience shouts insults and pornographic obscenities. Among these spectators is Napoleon’s physician and the most famous naturalist in Europe, the Baron George Cuvier, whose encounter with her will inspire a theory of race that will change European science forever.

Evoking the grand tradition of such “monster” tales as Frankensteinand The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Barbara Chase Riboud, prize-winning author of the classic Sally Hemings, again gives voice to an “invisible” of history. In this powerful saga, Sarah Baartman, for more than 200 years known only as the mysterious lady in the glass cage, comes vividly and unforgettably to life.

If you love reading horror then this is the perfect bookmark for you! Comes with the image of a tentacled Black horror baddie taking a lick off her eyeball lollipop. There are three total so you can share the love with some friends! Happy reading!

From the award-winning actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, two teeming, pungent cross-sections of the American experience.

In the provocative and at times bitterly funny play House Arrest, Smith examines the relationships between a succession of American presidents and their observers in and out of the press. Arcing from Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to Jefferson and Sally Hemings and alive with the voices of such real-life figures as Ed Bradley, George Stephanopoulos, Anita Hill, and Abraham Lincoln, the result is a priceless examination of the intersection of public power and private life.

In Piano, Smith casts her gaze back a century as she follows the tangled lines of race, sex, and exploitation in a prosperous Cuban household on the eve of the Spanish-American War. Deftly and suspensefully, Smith tells a story of ruptured allegiances and ramifying deceptions in which no one—master or servant, friend or enemy—is what he or she pretends to be. Together these two plays are further proof that Anna Deavere Smith is one of the most searing and revelatory voices in the American theater.

*ships in 7 -10 business days*

A stunning, contemporary Black southern gothic novel about what it means to be a poor woman in the God fearing south in the age of OnlyFans, by a breakout new Affrilachian writer, perfect for readers of The Other Black Girl and Luster

Magnolia Brown is nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, her predatory landlord, and the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown.

One night, while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia’s luck around with a lucrative “modeling” job at his family’s funeral home. She accepts. But despite things looking up, Magnolia’s problems fatten along with her wallet. When Cotton’s requests become increasingly weird, Magnolia discovers there’s a lot more at stake than just her rent.

Sharp as a belted knife, this sly social commentary cuts straight to the bone. House of Cotton will keep you mesmerized until the very last page.

WANTED - Bloodmaid of exceptional taste. Must have a keen proclivity for life’s finer pleasures. Girls of weak will need not apply.

A young woman is drawn into the upper echelons of a society where blood is power in this dark and enthralling Gothic novel from the author of The Year of the Witching.

Marion Shaw has been raised in the slums, where want and deprivation are all she know. Despite longing to leave the city and its miseries, she has no real hope of escape until the day she spots a peculiar listing in the newspaper seeking a bloodmaid.

Though she knows little about the far north—where wealthy nobles live in luxury and drink the blood of those in their service—Marion applies to the position. In a matter of days, she finds herself the newest bloodmaid at the notorious House of Hunger. There, Marion is swept into a world of dark debauchery. At the center of it all is Countess Lisavet.

The countess, who presides over this hedonistic court, is loved and feared in equal measure. She takes a special interest in Marion. Lisavet is magnetic, and Marion is eager to please her new mistress. But when she discovers that the ancient walls of the House of Hunger hide even older secrets, Marion is thrust into a vicious game of cat and mouse. She’ll need to learn the rules of her new home—and fast—or its halls will soon become her grave.

Serial the podcast meets The Other Black Girl in a haunted house, as young African author disappears after being invited to an exclusive writing residency, and her sister is left only with a true crime podcast to help her uncover the truth about what really happened…

Anaya Sebeya is missing.

Before her disappearance, Anaya was a brilliant writer: a rising star. Invited to a prestigious writing residency at Günter Huis, an eerie colonial mansion on the slopes of Devil’s Peak, Anaya was supposed to craft the next great African literary masterpiece—and so were four other young, emerging writers, all competing for the grand prize. But Anaya never made it home.

When a sensationalized true crime podcast about Anaya emerges, claiming to reveal everything that happened at Günter Huis, her sister Ranewa is both skeptical and furious. But with each surreal episode, Ranewa begins to piece together a truth worse than she ever could have imagined…

At Günter Huis, Anaya’s nightmares consume her. Time slips away from her. Günter Huis inflicts distorted visions and terrible supernatural visitations, pushing Anaya to tell a story no one dares. But exorcising the house’s endless cycle of evil requires a sacrifice that neither Anaya nor her fellows are ready to make.

In House of Margins, award-winning Motswana author Tlotlo Tsamaase delivers a mesmerizing story of a young generation facing colonialism’s cultural legacy in Africa.

From New York Times bestselling author J. Elle comes a modern-day YA romantic fantasy series opener about a glamorous magical world of social elites, forbidden love, and a dark magic that could destroy it all.

BURY YOUR SECRET OR DIE FOR IT.

17 year-old Quell has lived her entire life on the run. She and her mother have fled from city to city, in order to hide the deadly magic that flows through Quell’s veins. 

Until someone discovers her dark secret.

To hide from the assassin hunting her, and keep her mother out of harm’s way, Quell reluctantly inducts into a debutante society of magical social elites called the Order that she never knew existed. If she can pass their three rites of membership, mastering their proper form of magic, she’ll be able to secretly bury her forbidden magic forever. 

If caught, she will be killed.

But becoming the perfect debutante is a lot harder than Quell imagined, especially when there’s more than tutoring happening with Jordan, her brooding mentor and— assassin in training. 

When Quell uncovers the deadly lengths the Order will go to defend its wealth and power, she’s forced to choose: embrace the dark magic she’s been running from her entire life or risk losing everything, and everyone, she’s grown to love.

Still, she fears the most formidable monster she’ll have to face is the one inside.

Brimming with ballgowns and betrayal, magic and mystery, decadence and darkness, House of Marionne is perfect for readers who crave morally gray characters, irresistible romance, dark academia, and a deeply intoxicating and original world.

When Artie Howell moves with his wife back to her sleepy hometown, he must protect their son Nicky from the skeletons coming out of the closets from both of their pasts

WHEN THE HOWELL FAMILY MOVES INTO A HOUSE on Heckler Lane, it causes quite a stir around the small town of Sunny Cove, Pennsylvania. Elise Howell, a well-known cardio surgeon, has returned home after fifteen years to fill her recently deceased mother’s position at Sunny Cove General Hospital. In a town this size, it’s big news. But it’s Elise’s new husband, Artie, who has the whole town talking.

Artie Howell is a man who always seems to be wearing a smile. He’s an accomplished crime fiction writer, a soccer dad to their young son Nicky, and he volunteers his weekends teaching creative writing to youths in the local detention center. When they first arrived at Heckler Lane, the Howells had seemed like a wholesome American family. Then came the murders.

A nun turning up missing from the Convent of St. Mary becomes the first in a string of unexplained tragedies that have befallen the town. Tragedies that all seem to be tied to scenes from Artie’s novels. The writer now finds himself as the prime suspect in an investigation that threatens to not only tear apart his family, but the entire town of Sunny Cove.

*Ships in 7-10 business days*

When Ikemefuna is put on a plane from Lagos, Nigeria to Sugar Land, Texas, she anticipates her newly arranged All-American life: a handsome husband, a beautiful red-brick mansion, pizza parlors, and dance classes.

Desperate to please, she'll happily cater to her family's needs. But Ikemefuna soon discovers what it actually means to live with her in-laws. Demands for a grandson grow urgent as her every move comes under scrutiny. As Ikemefuna finds there’s no way out, her new husband grapples with the influence of his parents against his own increasing affection for her.

As family secrets boil to the surface, Ikemefuna must decide how to scrape herself out of an impossibly sticky situation: a marriage succumbing to generational cycles of pain and silence. In the end, she may be carrying the greatest secret of all. 

An unforgettably delicious thriller, House Woman is about a woman trapped in a dangerous web of conflicting desires, melting in the Texas heat. 

2025 Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters

A history of racism and segregation in twentieth-century Houston and beyond.

Through the 1950s and beyond, the Supreme Court issued decisions that appeared to provide immediate civil rights protections to racial minorities as it relegated Jim Crow to the past. For black Houstonians who had been hoping and actively fighting for what they called a “raceless democracy,” these postwar decades were often seen as decades of promise. In Houston and the Permanence of Segregation, David Ponton argues that these were instead “decades of capture”: times in which people were captured and constrained by gender and race, by faith in the law, by antiblack violence, and even by the narrative structures of conventional histories. Bringing the insights of Black studies and Afropessimism to the field of urban history, Ponton explores how gender roles constrained thought in black freedom movements, how the “rule of law” compelled black Houstonians to view injustice as a sign of progress, and how antiblack terror undermined Houston’s narrative of itself as a “heavenly” place.

Today, Houston is one of the most racially diverse cities in the United States, and at the same time it remains one of the most starkly segregated. Ponton’s study demonstrates how and why segregation has become a permanent feature in our cities and offers powerful tools for imagining the world otherwise.

2025 Bookstore Crawl Tote 

“This Great Hospital Fight” – Dr. Drake

At the height of racial and political tensions in early twentieth-century Houston, two unlikely figures became allies. Dr. William M. Drake, a pioneering surgeon and Black community leader, and Joseph Cullinan, a White oil magnate and founder of the company that became Texaco, united in a desperate effort to save a hospital that symbolized hope. The Houston Negro Hospital was born from America’s Black Hospital Movement. Dedicated Juneteenth 1926, it embodied a bold experiment to bring dignity and healthcare access to a community systematically denied both in the Jim Crow south.

Journalist and storyteller Carlton Houston―whose ancestors played a role in this remarkable heritage―reveals the untold, human drama behind the institution that would become Riverside General. Recount the vision, conflict, and resilience that shaped a century of healthcare through the struggle of those determined to save lives.

Join us to welcome in the new season of Houston Reads! with food, drinks, and mustic while meeting our incoming Houston Reads! Lead Facilitator, Chanecka Williams. 

EVENT DEETS:

When: Sunday, October 2 @ 430 PM 

Where: Kindred Stories (2304 Stuart Street, HTX 77004)

How: RSVP to reserve you spot! 

See ya'll there!

A message from Chanecka Williams:

"Alice Walker has been a force in the world for over forty years. As a writer, poet and activist, she is relentless in her pursuit of a free(er) world for all. In this social, political, time-space reality, Walker’s work feels essential to be explored with new eyes. Join us as we read her novels, short story collections, and a few of her nonfiction works. It would be remiss to not mention that this journey is as spiritual as literary being that Alice Walker has always given credit to the spirits that accompany her. "

A Note From Chanecka 

In April 1983, Gloria Naylor’s Women of Brewster Place and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple won National Book Awards, one of America's most prestigious literary prizes.  Naylor’s debut novel won the award for First Novel while Walker’s novel  won the prize for overall Fiction. This was a historical moment in Black literature history that has mostly gone unnoticed. As we finish reading the works of Gloria Naylor, it feels necessary to honor these two women’s achievements as well as examine their work in context.

Meeting Details

When: August 21, 2022 at 2PM-4PM

Where: This meeting will be held online with the virtual conferencing platform, Zoom. 

How:  Be sure to register for this month's bonus meeting.

About Project Row Houses

Project Row Houses is a community platform that enriches lives through art with an emphasis on cultural identity and its impact on the urban landscape. We engage neighbors, artists, and enterprises in collective creative action to help materialize sustainable opportunities in marginalized communities. 

Project Row Houses occupies a significant footprint in Houston’s Historic Third Ward, one of the city’s oldest African-American neighborhoods. The site encompasses five city blocks and houses 39 structures that serve as home base to a variety of community-enriching initiatives, art programs, and neighborhood development activities. PRH programs touch the lives of under-resourced neighbors, young single mothers with the ambition of a better life for themselves and their children, small enterprises with the drive to take their businesses to the next level, and artists interested in using their talents to understand and enrich the lives of others. Although PRH’s African-American roots are planted deeply in Third Ward, the work of PRH extends far beyond the borders of a neighborhood in transition. The Project Row Houses model for art and social engagement applies not only to Houston, but also to diverse communities around the world.

Kindred Stories is proud to partner with Project Row Houses and Chanecka Williams to present Houston Reads Zora Neale Hurston.

Zora Neale Hurston Meeting Schedule 

November 19 - Jonah’s Gourd (1934)

December 17 - Mules and Men (1935)

January 14 - Their Eyes are Watching God (1937)

February 18 - Tell My Horse (1938)

March 17 - Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)

April 21 - Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)

May 17 -  Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)

July 7, 2024 11 AM - 2 PM I Love Myself When I'm Laughing

July 28, 2024 11 AM - 2 PM The Completed Stories

August 25, 2024 11 AM - 2 PM Every Tongue Got to Confess

September 15 - Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (2018)

October 20 - Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020)

November 19 - You Don’t Know Us Negros and Other Essays (2022)

Life is hard. But it gets a whole lot easier when you start to talk it out. In How Am I Doing?, you're invited into a series of conversations with yourself to discover your purpose, honor your story, and explore who you want to be.

Dr. Corey Yeager, psychotherapist for the NBA’s Detroit Pistons and most recently featured on Oprah and Prince Harry's The Me You Can't See on Apple TV+, offers you 40 questions to help you raise awareness of your thoughts and emotions and reconnect with who you want to be.

Over the course of these 40 conversations with yourself, you're invited to:

• Build trust with yourself
• Consider how past traumas affect your life today
• Grow a practice of positive self-talk
• Let go of guilt and regret from your past
• Develop mental health strategies for what to for moments when you're depressed or anxious
• Increase your confidence and embrace your emotions

 Each of the 40 questions is paired with a short, thoughtful reflection from Dr. Yeager, along with prompts and self-care strategies to help you look at yourself in the mirror and come into alignment with who you want to be.

So join the conversation; nothing is off-limits here. Come check in with yourself and take these small, simple steps to journey toward a more honest and harmonious way of living.

*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price.

One of the world’s greatest bassists lays down the heart of Black music, revealing how its rhythmic structures and the long history of the African diaspora made it the world’s most popular form. 
 
“An insightful, revelatory, and informative read.” —Meshell Ndegeocello, singer-songwriter and poet

Why do Bob Marley, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, and Nina Simone move us the way they do? What drives the worried notes of the Delta blues? What makes Beyoncé’s triumph Cowboy Carter inescapably great?    
 
As Melvin Gibbs shows in How Black Music Took Over the World, it is the musical inheritance of Africa. Beginning with two rhythmic building blocks he calls the cell and the frame, Gibbs shows how those tools can transport listeners to “a realm where sounds become vehicles for human movement.” Reforged in the African diaspora in the Americas, they are played today on church organs, electric guitars, computers, telephones, or a simple gourd. Kool & the Gang called Black musicians the “scientists of sound”—and Gibbs shows how they discovered the world’s music.     
 
Gibbs’s vantage is unique. A world-class musician fluent in many genres, Gibbs is as comfortable in an old-school Times Square record shop as he is breaking down mathematics and music theory with university professors. Imbued with his own journey and a sharp eye for the sins and triumphs of history, How Black Music Took Over the World is an unforgettable revelation of one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

A clinical psychologist tells his story of navigating the field of psychology as a gay Black man.

In How I Know White People Are Crazy and Other Stories, Dr. Jonathan Lassiter pulls back the curtain on the mental health system and reveals the hurdles that Black psychologists and students are forced to endure in the field. He tackles how white ideology has harmed Black patients and how it dominates America’s mental health practices. 

As a Black gay man working as a psychologist under culturally insensitive supervisors and colleagues in America, he grows more frustrated with the exclusive talk of Sigmund Freud, and the narrowness of psychology study, with no one like him to vent to. All this takes a mental and physical toll on him.   

Using his expertise in research, his own therapy, and keeping a healthy dose of hip-hop/R&B music in his ears, Dr. Lassiter discovered a way where we can center culture in our healing. Through a series of essays, he demands that the lived and cultural experiences of people of color, LGBTQ+, and disabled communities are made a part of psychology practices so that we can understand, live in, and navigate this frustrating world.

This thought provoking, funny, and searing indictment of the mental health system for patients, students, and professionals alike will leave you thinking differently about the psychologists in your life.

How It Feels To Be Colored Me by Florida native Zora Neale Hurston was originally published in The World Tomorrow in May 1928. In this autobiographical piece about her own color, Hurston reflects on her early childhood in an all-black Florida town and her first experiences in life feeling different. In this beautiful piece, Hurston largely focuses on the similarities we all share and on her own self-identity in the face of difference. Through it all, I remain myself.  This short work is part of Applewood’s American Roots series, tactile mementos of American passions by some of America’s most famous writers and thinkers.

Thirteen-year-old Lamar Washington is the maddest, baddest bowler at Striker’s Bowling Paradise. But while Lamar’s a whiz at rolling strikes, he always strikes out with girls. And Lamar’s brother, Xavier the Basketball Savior, is no help. Xavier earns trophy after trophy on the basketball court and soaks up Dad’s attention, leaving no room for Lamar’s problems.

Until bad boy Billy Jenks convinces Lamar that hustling will help him win his dream girl, plus earn him enough money to buy an expensive pro ball and impress bowler Bubba Sanders. But when one of Billy’s schemes goes awry, Lamar ends up damaging every relationship in his life. Can Lamar figure out how to mend his broken ties, no matter what the cost?

This debut novel from Crystal Allen heralds the arrival of a fresh new voice in middle grade fiction.

*Ships in 7-10 business days*

Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

One secret. One decision. And everything she thought she knew unravels.

Annabelle Wilson has always played it safe. Perfect grades. Perfect daughter. Perfect future. But her freshman year at college isn’t going the way she planned. When she’s exposed for being a virgin, it shatters the version of herself she’s worked so hard to protect.

Suddenly, the girl who followed every rule is drowning in questions she doesn’t know how to answer. Who is she without the perfect plan? What if love isn’t the fairytale she imagined? And what happens when the people she trusts the most are the ones who can break her heart?

Raw, vulnerable, and deeply moving, How Not to Lose Your Virginity is a coming-of-age story about friendship, faith, betrayal, and first love - and the way one choice can change everything.

Annabelle’s story will break your heart, challenge your beliefs, and stay with you long after the final page.

How Stella Got Her Groove Back is full of Terry McMillan's signature humor, heart, and insight. More than a love story, it is ultimately a novel about how a woman saves her own life—and what she must risk to do it.

Stella Payne is forty-two, divorced, a high-powered investment analyst, mother of eleven-year-old Quincy- and she does it all. In fact, if she doesn't do it, it doesn't get done, from Little League carpool duty to analyzing portfolios to folding the laundry and bringing home the bacon. She does it all well, too, if her chic house, personal trainer, BMW, and her loving son are any indication. So what if there's been no one to share her bed with lately, let alone rock her world? Stella doesn't mind it too much; she probably wouldn't have the energy for love—and all of love's nasty fallout—anyway.

But when Stella takes a spur-of-the-moment vacation to Jamaica, her world gets rocked to the core—not just by the relaxing effects of the sun and sea and an island full of attractive men, but by one man in particular. He's tall, lean, soft-spoken, Jamaican, smells of citrus and the ocean—and is half her age. The tropics have cast their spell and Stella soon realizes she has come to a cataclysmic juncture: not only must she confront her hopes and fears about love, she must question all of her expectations, passions, and ideas about life and the way she has lived it.

*ships in 7-10 business days*

In Baxter’s Beach, Barbados, Lala’s grandmother Wilma tells the story of the one-armed sister. It’s a cautionary tale, about what happens to girls who disobey their mothers and go into the Baxter’s Tunnels. When she’s grown, Lala lives on the beach with her husband, Adan, a petty criminal with endless charisma whose thwarted burglary of one of the beach mansions sets off a chain of events with terrible consequences. A gunshot no one was meant to witness. A new mother whose baby is found lifeless on the beach. A woman torn between two worlds and incapacitated by grief. And two men driven into the Tunnels by desperation and greed who attempt a crime that will risk their freedom – and their lives.

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is an intimate and visceral portrayal of interconnected lives, across race and class, in a rapidly changing resort town, told by an astonishing new author of literary fiction.

Adapted from Clint Smith's #1 New York Times bestselling and universally acclaimed How the Word Is Passed, this must-read narrative takes readers to historical sites across America, exploring the legacy of slavery to help readers make sense of our nation's past and present, and be better stewards of their own future.

Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads young readers through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—offering an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.

How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to school, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods (like downtown Manhattan) on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved people has been deeply imprinted.

Informed by scholarship and brought alive by the story of people living today, this adaptation of Clint Smith’s #1 bestselling, award-winning work of nonfiction offers kids a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country, and shows how they can reckon with the past and present to become better stewards of their future.