From the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower:After the near-extinction of humanity, a new kind of alien-human hybrid must come to terms with their identity -- before their powers destroy what is left of humankind.

Celebrate the release of Positive Obsession with Susana M. Morris!

EVENT DEETS

When: Friday, February 27 @ 7PM

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

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to support the author and our store programming.

Please note outside copies of the book will not be allowed in the bookstore and you will not be eligible for the signing/photo line. You must buy a book from Kindred Stories or purchase the RSVP (BUT I HAVE THE BOOK) ticket. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

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.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susana M. Morris is a Black feminist scholar and a cultural critic who has dedicated her career to studying the interior lives of Black women. She is an associate professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and the co-founder of The Crunk Feminist Collective. A former Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University and Norman Freeling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, she is the author of Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler. Her other works include Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women's Literature, the co-edited collection The Crunk Feminist Collection, and the co-authored young adult handbook Feminist AF: The Guide to Crushing Girlhood. Her writing has appeared in Gawker, Long Reads, Cosmopolitan, and Ebony, and she has been featured in venues such as NPR, the BBC, the New York Times, and Essence magazine. 

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Melanye Price is the inaugural Director of The Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice at Prairie View A&M University. Dr. Price is an Endowed Professor of Political Science and served as the Principal Investigator for the African American Studies Initiative and the HBCU Student Voting Rights Lab. She has secured grants for the Simmons Center and her own research from various foundations including Mellon, Ford, LUMINA, and others. Price is the author of two books: The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race (NYU, 2016) and Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion (NYU, 2009). She is currently working on her third book project on the five decade history of voting rights activism at Prairie View. She also served as a Special Assistant to Ruth J. Simmons in her last year as President of Prairie View.

Dr. Price completed her B.A. magna cum laude in geography at Prairie View A&M University and her MA and PhD in political science at The Ohio State University. Dr. Price was recently named the 2024 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. Price has been a Black History Month lecturer for the US Embassy in Germany where she lectured at universities and community organizations across the country. Professor Price was one of the contributors to Stanley Nelson’s documentary, Obama: Through the Fire, which aired on BET. She has been a regular contributor for The New York Times Opinion section and also done political commentary for various local and national outlets. Dr. Price has also served as a consultant and commenter for the audio tour of two major exhibits at the Museum Fine Arts Houston—Philip Guston Now and Kehinde Wiley’s Archaeology of Silence.

In her free time, Melanye is an avid watcher of television, supporter of all things Black and Houston, and intrepid gardener!

*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

"Run away from the boy that gives you butterflies, he's going to break your heart." Morgan Atkins has been faithfully living by that creed ever since her heart was broken by her first love. She's terrified of feeling that rush and those butterflies again. She's settled down with a respectable man, and lives comfortably and in luxury. She has everything and wants for nothing...but her life is missing that spark.

When someone from her past erupts into her perfect life, Morgan starts to feel that rush again. Those butterflies. And while her mind tells her she shouldn't be going down this road, her heart tells her something else. The more involved she becomes in the illicit affair that follows, the more she can't tell the difference between right and wrong. Someone will end up hurt. Someone may end up dead. Will Morgan survive this storm? Or will she be ruined again by the ultimate heartbreak?

Two cheerleaders find themselves inconveniently tumbling head over heels for each other in this satirical, sapphic teen rom-com that’s Bring It On meets She Drives Me Crazy.

Oak Haven High doesn’t have cheerleaders—it has queerleaders.

It’s a fun coincidence that every new varsity cheerleader since Davie Cathee took the squad by storm three years ago is—or soon comes out as—queer.

But when a rumor sparks that this season, newly minted captain Davie has been specifically recruiting queer members only, Davie is accused of “discrimination” against straight students. She’s given an ultimatum: recruit a straight athlete for the team or the funding for their competitive cheer season will take a major tumble.

Enter Kendall Hayes, the edgy, mysterious new girl. When Davie sees that Kendall has a boyfriend, she quickly convinces her to join the squad. Problem solved.

Until she finds out that Kendall’s actually bisexual…and newly single.

Now Kendall and Davie are faced with having to keep those details under wraps until nationals, which only gets more complicated when they start falling hard and fast for each other. Can Kendall go back in the closet long enough to save the squad? Or will Davie find the courage to love her new crush out loud, even if it might mean the end of the queerleaders?

A cutting-edge collection of the best short stories in contemporary Afrofuturist fiction—from Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker award-winning Black authors

20 mind-blowing, horror-strewn, weird, and woke tales celebrate Black identity, community, and imagination

Black speculative fiction has never been better than it is here and now. On the shoulders of Afrofuturist masters like Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany and pioneering visionaries before them, a new, abundant, and brilliant generation of contemporary Black authors, some of them just beginning their careers, is conjuring up a very real renaissance.

Edited by SF-expert andré carrington, and including Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award winners alongside emerging and experimental voices, The Black Fantastic showcases the artistry of these breakout literary stars and celebrates the diversity of their talents.

Including Afrofuturist science fiction, weird and fantastic tales, horror and the paranormal, apocalyptic lyricism, time travel, superheroes, and more, here are twenty mindblowing, horror-strewn, weird, woke, nerdy, terrifying, liberating, fantastic, utopian, surreal, genre-defying and empowering short stories, all of them worth reading and rereading now and far into futurity.

Reclaiming histories of racism and oppression and seizing the day, these writers are forging kaleidoscopic new senses of Black identity, community, and imaginative freedom.

In the vein of Octavia E. Butler and Margaret Atwood, a harrowing novel set in an alternate United States—a world of injustice and bondage in which a young Black woman becomes the concubine of a powerful white government official and must face the dangerous consequences.

Solenne Bonet lives in Texas where choice no longer exists. An algorithm determines a Black woman’s occupation, spouse, and residence. Solenne finds solace in penning the biography of Henriette, an ancestor who’d been an enslaved concubine to a wealthy planter in 1800s Louisiana. But history repeats itself when Solenne, lonely and naïve, finds herself entangled with Bastien Martin, a high-ranking government official. Solenne finds the psychological bond unbearable, so she considers alternatives. With Henriette as her guide, she must decide whether and how to leave behind all she knows.  

Inspired by the lives of enslaved concubines to U.S. politicians and planters, The Blueprint unfolds over dual timelines to explore bodily autonomy, hypocrisy, and power imbalances through the lens of the nation’s most unprotected: a Black girl.

*ship in 7-10 business days

As his twenty-sixth birthday approaches, Desta Joy Walker finds himself in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the one place he's been actively avoiding most of his life. For Desta, the East African capital encompasses some of the happiest and saddest parts of his life-his first home and the place where his father died. When an unavoidable work obligation lands him there for twelve weeks, he may finally have a chance for the closure he so desperately needs. What Desta never expected was to catch a glimpse of his future as he reconnects with the beautiful country and his family's past.

Elias Fikru has never met an opportunity he hasn't seized. Except, of course, for the life-changing one, he's stubbornly ignored for the past nine months. He'd be a fool not to accept the chance to pursue his doctoral studies in the U.S., but saying yes means leaving his homeland, and Elias isn't ready to make that commitment.

Meeting Desta, the Dominican-American emergency relief worker with the easy smile and sad eyes, makes Elias want things he's never envisioned for himself. Rediscovering his country through Desta's eyes emboldens Elias to reach for a future where he can be open about every part of himself. But when something threatens the future that's within their grasp, Elias and Desta must put it all on the line for love.

Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.

“The most profound terror is rooted in love—the terror of losing love, of love betrayed, of love in peril. Justin C. Key’s work is a cold knife through a hot heart, a surgical blade unleashing gouts of searing fear.”—Cory Doctorow, author of Red Team Blues, Little Brother, and Radicalized

“An electrifying collection of stories that would make Octavia E. Butler smile.”—Ebony

Black Mirror meets Get Out in this gripping story collection reminiscent of the work of Octavia E. Butler, deftly blending science fiction, horror, and fantasy to examine issues of race, class, and prejudice—an electrifying, oftentimes heartbreaking debut from an extraordinary new voice—
now available as a limited Olive Edition from Harper Perennial.

In The World Wasn’t Ready for You, Justin C. Key builds on his lifelong obsession with monsters as he expands and subverts the horror genre to expertly explore issues of race, class, prejudice, love, exclusion, loneliness, and what it means to be a person in the world, while revealing the horrifying nature inherent in all of us.

In the opening story, “The Perfection of Theresa Watkins,” a sci-fi love story turned nightmare, a husband uses new technology to download the consciousness of his recently deceased Black wife into the body of a white woman. In “Spider King,” an inmate agrees to participate in an experimental medical study offered to Black prisoners in exchange for early release, only to find his body reacting with disturbing symptoms. And in the title story, a father tries to protect his son, teaching him how to navigate a racist world that does not understand him and sees him as a threat.

The World Wasn’t Ready for You is a gripping, provocative, and distinctly original collection that demonstrates Key’s remarkable literary gifts—a skill at crafting science fiction stories equaled by an ability to sculpt characters and narrative—as well as his utterly fresh take on how genre can be used to delight, awe, frighten, and ultimately challenge our perceptions. Wildly imaginative and powerfully resonant, it introduces an unforgettable new voice in fiction.

The full set of books in the 2026 Olive Editions series include:

* Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
* Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin
* Island by Aldous Huxley
* Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
* The Princess Bride by William Goldman
* The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker
* Highfire by Eoin Colfer
* The World Wasn’t Ready for You by Justin Key

*Ships in 7-10 business days*

In The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, singer-songwriter, actor, fashion icon, activist, and worldwide superstar Janelle Monáe brings to the written page the Afrofuturistic world of one of her critically acclaimed albums, exploring how different threads of liberation—queerness, race, gender plurality, and love—become tangled with future possibilities of memory and time in such a totalitarian landscape…and what the costs might be when trying to unravel and weave them into freedoms.

Whoever controls our memories controls the future.

Janelle Monáe and an incredible array of talented collaborating creators have written a collection of tales comprising the bold vision and powerful themes that have made Monáe such a compelling and celebrated storyteller. Dirty Computer introduced a world in which thoughts—as a means of self-conception—could be controlled or erased by a select few. And whether human, A.I., or other, your life and sentience was dictated by those who’d convinced themselves they had the right to decide your fate.

That was until Jane 57821 decided to remember and break free.

Expanding from that mythos, these stories fully explore what it’s like to live in such a totalitarian existence…and what it takes to get out of it. Building off the traditions of speculative writers such as Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Becky Chambers, and Nnedi Okorafor—and filled with the artistic genius and powerful themes that have made Monáe a worldwide icon in the first place—The Memory Librarian serves readers tales grounded in the human trials of identity expression, technology, and love, but also reaching through to the worlds of memory and time within, and the stakes and power that exists there.