Rediscover the sensational 1967 literary thriller that captures the bitter struggles of postwar Black intellectuals and artists

With a foreword by Ishmael Reed and a new introduction by Merve Emre about how this explosive novel laid bare America's racial fault lines

Max Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. An expat for many years, Max returns to Europe one last time to settle an old debt with his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, and to attend the Paris funeral of his friend, rival, and mentor Harry Ames, a character loosely modelled on Richard Wright.

In Amsterdam, among Harry’s papers, Max uncovers explosive secret government documents outlining “King Alfred,” a plan to be implemented in the event of widespread racial unrest and aiming “to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society.” Realizing that Harry has been assassinated, Max must risk everything to get the documents to the one man who can help.

Greeted as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, The Man Who Cried I Am stakes out a range of experience rarely seen in American fiction: from the life of a Black GI to the ferment of postcolonial Africa to an insider’s view of Washington politics in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, including fictionalized portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. John A. Williams and his lost classic are overdue for rediscovery.

Few novels have so deliberately blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality as The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and many of its early readers assumed the King Alfred plan was real. In her introduction, Merve Emre examines the gonzo marketing plan behind the novel that fueled this confusion and prompted an FBI investigation. This deluxe paperback also includes a new foreword by novelist Ishmael Reed.

Celebrate the release of Ashes at the Altar with LaDarrion Williams!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, September 17 @ 7PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)

What: 

• Bookclub Discussion for Books 1 & 2 in the series
• Q&A with the author about Ashes at the Altar
• Activities and Games 
• Author Signing
• Giveaways

How:

• RSVP Only – Reserve your spot at the event.
• RSVP with Book – Reserve your spot and a copy of Ashes At The Altar
• RSVP with the Blood At The Root Trilogy Hardcover Bundle – Reserve your spot and receive a hardcover bundle of all three books in the Root Trilogy.

Please Note: Copies of Ashes at the Altar purchased from other retailers are not permitted inside the bookstore and are not eligible for the signing or photo line. To participate in the signing and photo opportunity, you must purchase the event book from Kindred Stories. If you have already purchased your copy from Kindred Stories, you may select the RSVP Only ticket option and bring your Kindred Stories copy to the event. You are also welcome to bring additional books by the author to be signed, but a Kindred Stories event book purchase is required to join the signing line.

If you purchase a ticket and are unable to attend the event, your ticket is non-refundable. If your ticket includes a book, an email will be sent to all attendees before and after the event with instructions on how to receive your book. Books must be claimed within 14 days following the event. If your book is not retrieved it will be returned to the publisher and will not be available for pick up in the future.

ABOUT THE BOOK

At a hidden magical HBCU a teen boy must confront evil spirits, family secrets and tested loyalties. In this haunting finale to the New York Times bestselling Blood at the Root trilogy, bloodlines, betrayal, and legacy collide in a battle that may cost everything.

Malik Baron has learned a lot since he first came to Caiman University: History is power. Family is more than just blood. You can't escape your past. And magic always comes with a price. 

But nothing he's been taught could have prepared him for what this semester will bring. Even after he risked it all to trap the evil spirit Marinette that has been possessing his mother, her power continues to grow. And with her and the Bokors still at large, the cracks in the magical community have reached a breaking point. Just as Malik begins to get to know his father's family, the Bonclairs' power is challenged, leaving him to decide where his loyalties lie. And it's not just the future of Caiman at stake, but the very magic that runs in his veins. 

In the propulsive and emotional conclusion to this powerful trilogy, the future and the family Malik has fought so hard to build and protect is in greater danger than ever. But with the power of ancestors and the strength of his loved ones behind him, can he fight for what the world has always said is impossible for a Black boy like him—a happy ending?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hailing from the small town of Helena, Alabama, LaDarrion Williams is a self-taught playwright, filmmaker, author, and screenwriter committed to shaping a new era of Black fantasy. His theatrical work has garnered attention at notable venues, including the Echo Theatre Playwrights Lab, the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, TSU’s Black and Latino Playwrights Festival, and the Boise Contemporary Theater BIPOC Playwrights Festival.

Beyond theater, LaDarrion has directed three short films featured on YouTube and made his mark as a debut author with Blood at the Root, a New York Times and USA Today Bestseller. Through storytelling across multiple mediums, he continues to craft narratives that amplify Black voices, history, and imagination.

A COLLECTION OF INCISIVE ESSAYS ABOUT AFRICAN ART, CULTURE AND THE CONTINENT’S STRUGGLE TO SHAKE OFF EUROPEAN RULE

Too many of our convictions about the fifty-four nations of Africa come from non-African sources. Western media often treat the continent as a simulacrum of Western anxieties. In contrast, Jeremy Harding focuses on specific historical episodes and cultural practices – cinema, art, ethnography and journalism – to steer us away from treacherous generalisations.

Analogue Africa celebrates the ingenuity with which African artists – and a handful of Europeans – have reimagined the colonial encounter and voiced their impatience with white minority rule. Among his illustrious cast of filmmakers, photographers, writers and painters are Seydou Keïta, Sanlé Sory, Ernest Cole, Sarah Maldoror, John Akomfrah, William Kentridge and Binyavanga Wainaina. Harding argues that Western museums with priceless African holdings – the British Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly, the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium – are now the sites of a struggle over the colonial past, adding the latest chapter to an unfinished history.

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Every secret comes to haunt you in this YA horror that combines the swoony romance and emotional resonance of John Green with the surrealist horror imagery and razor-sharp wit of Jordan Peele.

Seventeen-year-old Hylee Williams didn’t ask to disappear. But she did disappear, and not only that, but when she vanished from our world, she materialized in a dark, twisted version of the night that changed her life forever: the night her older brother went missing.

Just as Hylee realizes this moment could be the key to unraveling the truth about her brother, she’s yanked away from the dark place back to our world. Craving a sense of normalcy, she goes to a party with her best friend—where she meets Eilam Roads. Tall, handsome, and undeniably, inexplicably familiar, Hylee can’t help the pull she feels towards him. It’s a classic teen girl-meets-boy situation, until it happens again. She disappears, right in front of him.

Together, Hylee and Eilam investigate the truth about time, space, and reality, with Hylee increasingly convinced her time travel holds the key to saving her brother. But the more they learn, the more Hylee begins to see darkness lurking in her world—and in herself.

Opening up the cosmos of an entire continent - New perspectives on Africa

This lavishly illustrated volume explores Africa from multiple points of view as it progresses beyond prejudice and stereotypes. Combining cultural history with contemporary art, it presents a diverse range of artistic voices and shifting viewpoints. Human history intersects with the colonial past and the omnipresent influence of Africa across the world.

A fresh lens capturing the cosmos of Africa and its everlasting presence in our global societies.

This lavishly illustrated volume approaches the vast continent of Africa from a variety of viewpoints; beyond prejudice and stereotypes, via cultural history and contemporary art: by means of permanent changes of perspective and a diversity of artistic voices. The history of humankind meets the colonial past and the omnipresence of aspects of Africa in many regions of the world.
 
On the one hand, surprising views of Africa are focused on from Europe. And on the other, works and installations by Africans or protagonists from the diaspora present ideas, impulses and identities which all signify Africa. The texts illustrate the broad time frame from the first humans to Pan-Africanism and Afro-Futurism, as well as present literary and philosophical narratives.

ARTISTS:
DELE ADEYEMO, JOHN AKOMFRAH, JAMES GREGORY ATKINSON, SAMMY BALOJI, ARÉBÉNOR BASSÉNE, MEMORY BIWA, MARÍA MAGDALENA CAMPOS-PONS, CATPC, OMAR VICTOR DIOP, SOKARI DOUGLAS CAMP, WILLIAM KENTRIDGE, KONGO ASTRONAUTS, SUSANA PILAR DELAHANTA MANTIENZO, ROMÉO MIVEKANNIN, ZANELE MUHOLI, JOSÈFA NTJAM, KALOKI NYAMAI, EMEKA, OGBOH, ZINEB SEDIRA, SANDRA SEGHIR, YINKA SHONIBARE, THE SINGH TWINS, GÉRALDINE TOBE, KARA WALKER, CARRIE MAE WEEMS

A 50th-anniversary tribute to one of America’s first racially integrated exhibitions

In August 1971 Peter Bradley mounted the landmark exhibition The De Luxe Show at the legendary DeLUXE theater in Houston's Fifth Ward. The De Luxe Show was a milestone in civil rights history, as one of the first racially integrated shows in the United States. Curated by Bradley with the backing of collector and philanthropist John de Menil, the exhibition featured emerging and established abstract modern painters and sculptors of the time, including Darby Bannard, Peter Bradley, Anthony Caro, Dan Christensen, Ed Clark, Frank Davis, Sam Gilliam, Robert Gordon, Richard Hunt, Virginia Jaramillo, Daniel Johnson, Craig Kauffman, Alvin Loving, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Michael Steiner, William T. Williams and James Wolfe.

In August 2021, for its 50th anniversary, Karma and Parker Gallery staged a contemporary bicoastal tribute to The De Luxe Show. The tribute honors the long, pioneering legacies of the artists of The De Luxe Show, and continues the dialogue between these innovators in the field of abstraction that began 50 years ago. This fully illustrated catalog includes texts and installation images from the original 1971 catalog, as well as a newly commissioned text by Amber Jamilla Musser and a text by Bridget R. Cooks that expands upon her 2013 essay in Gulf Coast.

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Afro-Atlantic Histories brings together a selection of more than 400 works and documents by more than 200 artists from the 16th to the 21st centuries that express and analyze the ebbs and flows between Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe. The book is motivated by the desire and need to draw parallels, frictions and dialogues around the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories―their experiences, creations, worshiping and philosophy. The so-called Black Atlantic, to use the term coined by Paul Gilroy, is geography lacking precise borders, a fluid field where African experiences invade and occupy other nations, territories and cultures.
The plural and polyphonic quality of “histórias” is also of note; unlike the English “histories,” the word in Portuguese carries a double meaning that encompasses both fiction and nonfiction, personal, political, economic and cultural, as well as mythological narratives.
The book features more than 400 works from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean, as well as Europe, from the 16th to the 21st century. These are organized in eight thematic groupings: Maps and Margins; Emancipations; Everyday Lives; Rites and Rhythms; Routes and Trances; Portraits; Afro Atlantic Modernisms; Resistances and Activism.
Artists include: Nina Chanel Abney, Emma Amos, Benny Andrews, Emanoel Araujo, Maria Auxiliadora, Romare Bearden, John Biggers, Paul Cézanne, Victoria Santa Cruz, Beauford Delaney, Aaron Douglas, Melvin Edwards, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Ben Enwonwu, Ellen Gallagher, Theodore Géricault, Barkley Hendricks, William Henry Jones, Loïs Mailou Jones, Titus Kaphar, Wifredo Lam, Norman Lewis, Ibrahim Mahama, Edna Manley, Archibald Motley, Abdias Nascimento, Gilberto de la Nuez, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Dalton Paula, Rosana Paulino, Howardena Pindell, Heitor dos Prazeres, Joshua Reynolds, Faith Ringgold, Gerard Sekoto, Alma Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Rubem Valentim, Kara Walker and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time, their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and ethnocentrism among African Americans. Offering insight into Afro-Latin@ life and new ways to understand culture, ethnicity, nation, identity, and antiracist politics, The Afro-Latin@ Reader presents a kaleidoscopic view of Black Latin@s in the United States. It addresses history, music, gender, class, and media representations in more than sixty selections, including scholarly essays, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, poetry, short stories, and interviews.

While the selections cover centuries of Afro-Latin@ history, since the arrival of Spanish-speaking Africans in North America in the mid-sixteenth-century, most of them focus on the past fifty years. The central question of how Afro-Latin@s relate to and experience U.S. and Latin American racial ideologies is engaged throughout, in first-person accounts of growing up Afro-Latin@, a classic essay by a leader of the Young Lords, and analyses of U.S. census data on race and ethnicity, as well as in pieces on gender and sexuality, major-league baseball, and religion. The contributions that Afro-Latin@s have made to U.S. culture are highlighted in essays on the illustrious Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and music and dance genres from salsa to mambo, and from boogaloo to hip hop. Taken together, these and many more selections help to bring Afro-Latin@s in the United States into critical view.

Contributors: Afro–Puerto Rican Testimonies Project, Josefina Baéz, Ejima Baker, Luis Barrios, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Adrian Burgos Jr., Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Adrián Castro, Jesús Colón, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen, William A. Darity Jr., Milca Esdaille, Sandra María Esteves, María Teresa Fernández (Mariposa), Carlos Flores, Juan Flores, Jack D. Forbes, David F. Garcia, Ruth Glasser, Virginia Meecham Gould, Susan D. Greenbaum, Evelio Grillo, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Tanya K. Hernández, Victor Hernández Cruz, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Lisa Hoppenjans, Vielka Cecilia Hoy, Alan J. Hughes, María Rosario Jackson, James Jennings, Miriam Jiménez Román, Angela Jorge, David Lamb, Aida Lambert, Ana M. Lara, Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, Tato Laviera, John Logan, Antonio López, Felipe Luciano, Louis Pancho McFarland, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wayne Marshall, Marianela Medrano, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Yvette Modestin, Ed Morales, Jairo Moreno, Marta Moreno Vega, Willie Perdomo, Graciela Pérez Gutiérrez, Sofia Quintero, Ted Richardson, Louis Reyes Rivera, Pedro R. Rivera , Raquel Z. Rivera, Yeidy Rivero, Mark Q. Sawyer, Piri Thomas, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Nilaja Sun, Sherezada “Chiqui” Vicioso, Peter H. Wood

“Mahalia Jackson was the greatest gospel singer of her time and an overlooked leader in the Civil Rights Movement. Her voice seemed born of heaven.” ?Henry Louis Gates Jr.

If Americans today still recognize the name Mahalia Jackson, they might recall that she was perhaps the greatest gospel singer who ever lived. But for many people, there is no awareness at all, not even for an entertainer whose “Move On Up a Little Higher” sold eight million copies, who headlined two Newport Jazz Festivals and performed before four United States presidents.

While this rich musical legacy is admired by those in the know, virtually no one recognizes Jackson’s astonishing role in American civil rights history. In this startling new depiction of the renowned gospel singer, New York Times best-selling author Timothy B. Tyson and Mary D. Williams, an acclaimed gospel singer herself, bring Jackson back to soaring life by positioning her as the major civil rights figure she, in fact, was.

Mahlia Jackson, Moving On Up a Little Higher then traces Jackson’s career from abject poverty in New Orleans to global superstardom, revealing how even after meteoric success, Jackson maintained an unwavering devotion to Black freedom. In the 1930s in Chicago, even before the Civil Rights Movement took its modern shape, she used her rapturous voice to support independent Black political power. Her work only intensified in the 1940s and beyond when she campaigned first for Franklin D. Roosevelt, and later for Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson; headlined in Montgomery for the 1955–56 bus boycott; sang for the Birmingham campaign and on the Selma March; and performed at the iconic 1963 March on Washington, where she urged Martin Luther King Jr. to “Tell ’em about the dream.” In retrospect what becomes historically significant is that Mahalia Jackson was present at so many civil rights events, even singing a divine rendition of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” at Dr. King’s funeral in 1968. Weakened and worn, she succumbed to heart failure four years later at the age of sixty.

Weaving together Mahalia Jackson’s inspiring life journey with her soulful music into a transcendent text, this biography ultimately casts Mahalia Jackson as we’ve never seen her before, as a guiding light for the Civil Rights Movement, whose message still speaks to our struggles today.

5 illustrations

From the award-winning anthologists, a beautiful new book of short stories, designed as a perfect gift for readers of the supernatural, and a lifetime of reading pleasure.

A new anthology of Folk Horror stories, covering a wide range of mythologies and dark corners from around the world, revealing tales from the shadows of isolation, creepy forests and horrors rising from the land itself. Award-winning anthologists Paul Kane and Marie O'Regan have commissioned and chosen an outstanding selection of stories with contributions from authors including Neil Gaiman, John Connolly, Adam L.G. Nevill, Alison Littlewood and Jen Williams. Five brand new stories have also been selected from open submissions.

The full list of featured authors in this book is: Linda D. Addison, V. Castro, John Connolly, Neil Gaiman, Helen Grant, Kathryn Healy, H.R. Laurence, Alison Littlewood, Lee Murray, Adam L.G. Nevill, Cavan Scott, Christina Sng, Benjamin Spada, Stephen Volk, Jen Williams, Katie Young and B. Zelkovich.

The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative. The books themselves are gorgeous, with foiled covers, printed edges and published only in hardcover editions, offering a lifetime of reading pleasure.

Frederick Douglass was the most prominent African American of the 19th Century and Sidney Morrison has created a mesmerizing historical novel richly detailing his life and the Civil War Era

Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass did what seemed impossible: he escaped, reinvented himself, and rose to become one of the most powerful voices in American history—a fierce abolitionist, gifted orator, founder of The North Star, and collaborator with Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Susan B. Anthony in ending slavery and shaping U.S. democracy itself.

But in this singular work of historical fiction, Sidney Morrison is able to move beyond the legend to explore the full complexity of Douglass's interior life: the loves he protected, the choices he made, the costs paid for his greatness. Anna Murray Douglass, the wife instrumental to his escape. Julia Griffith, the British abolitionist whose closeness sparked scandal. Ottilie Assing, the German journalist who died by suicide after Douglass married another woman. Here is Douglass as history has never quite shown him: a towering public figure and a deeply complex private man, whose life was rich in conflict, consequence, and humanity.