“As you turn the pages of this novel and get lost in Dana’s story, allow yourself to relive the horrors of slavery....Allow yourself to know the pain of our nation’s past.”—Tomi Adeyemi, New York Times bestseller and Hugo and Nebula award-winning author, from the new foreword

This brand new package for young adults includes a redesigned interior for better readability, specially commissioned cover art by Carlos Fama, metallic stock cover, and spot gloss on cover elements

“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”

Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.

Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times).

“Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” 
—N. K. Jemisin

More than 35 years after its release, Kindred continues to draw in new readers with its deep exploration of the violence and loss of humanity caused by slavery in the United States, and its complex and lasting impact on the present day. Adapted by celebrated academics and comics artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings, this graphic novel powerfully renders Butler’s mysterious and moving story, which spans racial and gender divides in the antebellum South through the 20th century.

Butler’s most celebrated, critically acclaimed work tells the story of Dana, a young black woman who is suddenly and inexplicably transported from her home in 1970s California to the pre–Civil War South. As she time-travels between worlds, one in which she is a free woman and one where she is part of her own complicated familial history on a southern plantation, she becomes frighteningly entangled in the lives of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder and one of Dana’s own ancestors, and the many people who are enslaved by him.

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.

“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

“All my blessings are the blessings of community.”
―Octavia Spencer

“Give them their flowers while you can” is something Octavia Spencer’s mother often told her, and now, it’s how she lives.
In this captivating memoir, the Oscar-winning actor and producer recounts the seeds of the relationships that grew into the story of her life, from her tender teenage connection with Whoopi Goldberg to her sustaining friendships with Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy, Allison Janney, Viola Davis, Jessica Chastain, and the many talented, inspiring women whose love and advice have helped her become the woman she is today.
Octavia drove to Los Angeles at twenty-six in search of a career. What she found was her chosen family, and together they built the world in which this book is set: a place where women support one another and the voices of history’s heroines ring aloud.
Give Them Their Flowers is a love letter to female friendship. It is a call to follow your personal passions, create community, and persevere. This is Octavia’s ode to all the women who wake up early to get it done: the mentors, the mothers, and the mother figures, the aunties and the godmothers, the creators, the visionaries, and the best friends.
“Men have given me jobs,” Octavia says. “Women are the reason the world knows who I am.”

Juxtaposing the world-building of afrofuturism and the world-negating of afropessimism to show how both movements have offered us critical resources of hope.
 
Science fiction imagines aliens and global crises as world-unifying events, both a threat and promise for the future. Black Apocalypse is an introduction to the past and present of black engagement with speculative futures. From Octavia Butler to W.E.B. Du Bois to Sun Ra, Tavia Nyong’o shows that the end of the world is crucial to afrofuturism and reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore their similarities.
 
Interweaving black trans, queer, and feminist theories, Nyong'o examines the social, technological, and existential threats facing our species and reflects on shifting anxieties and hopes for the future. Exploring the apocalypse in movies, art, literature, and music, this book considers the endless afterlives of slavery and inequality and revives the radical black imagination to envision the future of blackness. Black Apocalypse argues that black aesthetics take us to the edge of this world and into the next.

In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madness. Pickens considers Butler's Fledgling as an archive of Black madness that demonstrates how race and ability shape subjectivity while constructing the building blocks for antiracist and anti-ableist futures. She examines how Hopkinson's Midnight Robber theorizes mad Blackness and how Due's African Immortals series contests dominant definitions of the human. The theorizations of race and disability that emerge from these works, Pickens demonstrates, challenge the paradigms of subjectivity that white supremacy and ableism enforce, thereby pointing to the potential for new forms of radical politics.

*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.