Search results: 65 results for “bell hooks”
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65 results
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PRE-ORDER: The Disappearers: A Novel
PRE-ORDER: The Disappearers: A Novel
$32.00From Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings: a propulsive novel about the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its tragic consequences
In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: All of them are gay―a “battyman” in Jamaican argot―and all of them must contend with the dangers that such a truth lays bare.
One night a mob savagely attacks them, killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional as it is physical. As their bodies heal, each man grapples with the violence, the hatred, and the rage that the attack made plain. Some try to ignore what the attack has unearthed, while others double down on retribution.
In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.
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AUTHOR TALK: No Sense In Wishing with Lawrence Burney - July 10 @ 6 PM
AUTHOR TALK: No Sense In Wishing with Lawrence Burney - July 10 @ 6 PM
from $5.00Celebrate the release of No Sense in Wishing with Lawrence Burney!
EVENT DEETS
When: Friday July 10 @ 6 PM CST
Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)
How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to grab your copy of No Sense In Wishing, 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
ABOUT THE BOOK
A personal and analytical essay collection from culture critic Lawrence Burney that is a personal and analytical look at his home city of Baltimore, music from throughout the global Black diaspora, and the traditions that raised him.
There are moments in our lives when we discover an artist, an album, a film, or a cultural artifact that leaves a lasting impression. These moments inform how we understand the world, and ourselves, moving forward.
In a time when music is spurring Black Americans’ connection with Africans on the Continent, culture critic Lawrence Burney takes us on a journey from the streets of Baltimore to the concert halls of Lagos, reminisces on seeing his mother perform as the opening act of a Gil Scott-Heron show when he was a child, and sits at a Maryland crab feast with family, assessing how the Black people in his home state have historically improvised paths for their liberation. Burney explores these profound interactions with incisive and energizing prose, offering us a personal and critical perspective on the people, places, music, and art that transformed him.
No Sense in Wishing is a kaleidoscopic exploration of Burney’s search for self. With its gutsy and uncompromising criticism alongside intimate personal storytelling, this “powerful collection of essays” (Rolling Stone) is like an album that hits all the right notes, from a promising writer on the rise.ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lawrence Burney is a writer, editor, critic, and the founder of True Laurels, an independent magazine covering Baltimore’s music and culture scene. His work has appeared in publications such as New York Magazine, GQ, Washington Post and Pitchfork. He has also worked as an editor at The Fader, a staff writer at VICE, and an editor/reporter at The Baltimore Banner. His first book, No Sense in Wishing, a collection of essays, was published in July 2025 via Atria Books. His second book, Sing Back To Me, will also be published by Atria Books. Follow him on Instagram and X @TrueLaurels.
ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard.
Laymon is at work on the books, Good God, and City Summer, Country Summer, and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their on their own terms, in their own communities. He is the co-host of Reckon True Stories with Deesha Philyaw. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
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Juneteenth (A We Celebrate Book): A Board Book
Juneteenth (A We Celebrate Book): A Board Book
$9.99This inspiring photographic board book celebrating Juneteenth is from the ALA Stonewall Award–winning team Little Feminist team
Freedom feels like hugs and kisses, unity, strength and pride.
Freedom feels like a million steps forward―together with every stride.From award-winning indie publisher Little Feminist Press comes an engaging board book celebrating Juneteenth and its powerful history. Bursting with beautiful, community-sourced photographs, this board book features powerful images of Black joy, allyship from all demographics, and the many ways people can celebrate this important American holiday.
Showcasing real families and communities, young readers will see festivities and merriment in action as kids, their adoring adult caretakers, and their neighbors share stories, prepare meals, listen, hug, dance, show kindness, demonstrate bravery, and step in to help their families and communities.
The book also includes family discussion questions and a note for grown-ups on how to use this book with young children.
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JULY 2026: Romance Book Club - July 8 @ 7PM
JULY 2026: Romance Book Club - July 8 @ 7PM
$0.00We're meeting to discuss The Missed Connection!
BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS
When: Wednesday, July 8 @ 7PM CST
Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)
How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend! Support the Romance Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!
*This book is currently on PRE-ORDER and has an on sale date for June 9th. You can purchase now for your book to be picked up or shipped on June 9th.
ABOUT THE MISSED CONNECTION
New York Times bestselling author Tia Williams returns with an intensely romantic, deliciously sexy tale about a woman searching for her handsome seatmate on a European flight--and the unexpected places her hunt for love leads her.
Sasha Cruz knows types. As a booked-and-busy casting agent, she's always casting -- at happy hour, the post office, the grocery store, everywhere. She's all about finding the perfect person to slot into the perfect role. What she doesn't do, however, are relationships. Too much energy, not enough time. Men find her intimidating, and she likes it that way.
But when Sasha's seated next to a mysterious, broodingly handsome Italian man on the way to a work trip in Paris, sparks fly - but they miss the chance to exchange contact information. Now, convinced that she's lost out on her soulmate, Sasha is on a manhunt to find Seat F.
Sasha enlists her work friend for help in the search, but when she accidentally emails the entire global company, colleagues around the world begin looking for Seat F, too - with some finding love along the way. Meanwhile, Sasha takes matters into her own hands, hiring a smoldering detective who complicates matters in unforeseen ways
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JULY 2026: NO NAME BOOK CLUB - JuLY 26 @ 3 PM CST
JULY 2026: NO NAME BOOK CLUB - JuLY 26 @ 3 PM CST
$0.00No Name is a Black-owned worker cooperative connecting community members both inside and outside carceral facilities with radical books. Each month, No Name uplifts two books written by Black, indigenous, and other people of color. No Name believes building community through political education is crucial for our liberation and should be accessible to everyone—which is why all programming is free.
MEETING DEETSWhen: Sunday, July 26 @ 3 PMWhere: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)How: RSVP to let us know you're coming! Support No Name Bookclub by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!ABOUT RAZORBLADE TEARSA black father and a white father join forces on a crusade for revenge against the people who murdered their gay sons, by the award-winning author of Blacktop Wasteland.
Ike Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid.
The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah’s white husband Derek. Isiah was a gay black man in the American South; Ike couldn’t bring himself to attend his son’s wedding. Isiah was a man Ike never understood. A boy he was never there for the way he should have been.
Derek’s father Buddy Lee is also suffering. He’d barely spoken to his son in five years; he was as ashamed of Derek for being gay as Derek was ashamed his father was a criminal. Buddy Lee still has contacts in the underworld, though, and he wants to know who killed his boy.
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JULY 2026: Horror Book Club - July 21 @ 7PM
JULY 2026: Horror Book Club - July 21 @ 7PM
$0.00We're meeting to discuss Blood Slaves by Markus Redmond!
BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS
When: Tuesday, July 21 @ 7PM CST
Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)
How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend! Support the Horror Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!
ABOUT BLOOD SLAVES
For readers of Victor LaValle, Tananarive Due, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, this ingenious reimagining of the vampire origin story set during the early days of American slavery blends alternate history with supernatural horror, as the last surviving member of an ancient African vampire tribe meets a slave desperate for freedom, and together, they lead an army of enslaved people in a cinematically blood-soaked battle for freedom and revenge.
What if nobody ever freed the slaves…because they freed themselves – 150 years before the Civil War?
In the Province of Carolina, 1710, freedom seems unattainable for Willie, for his beloved Gertie, and for their unborn child. They live, suffer, and toil under their brutal master, James “Big Jim” Barrow, whose grand plantation was built by the blood, sweat, and tears of the enslaved. To flee this hell on earth is be hunted and killed. Until one strange night Willie is offered a dark hope by Rafazi, an enigmatic slave with an irresistible and blood-chilling path to liberation.
Hailing from the Kingdom of Ghana, Rafazi is the lone survivor of the Ramanga, an African vampire tribe rendered nearly extinct by plague. Rafazi has roamed the world for centuries with an undying desire to replenish the power that once defined his heritage. In Willie, Rafazi has found his first biddable subject to be turned and to help in a hungry revolt. And Willie desires nothing more than to free his people from malicious bondage. Whatever it takes.
One by one, as an army of blood slaves thirsting for revenge is gathered, the headstrong Gertie fears that no good can come from the vampiric legacy that courses through Rafazi’s veins. Willie knows that only evil can fight evil. And when the woman he loves stands between the reemergence of the Ramanga and the justified slaughter of the oppressors, Willie must make an irreversible decision. Only one thing is certain: on the Barrow plantation, and beyond, blood will spill.
Part historical drama, part supernatural horror, and part alternate history, Blood Slaves is an ingenuous and defiant new creation myth of the vampire, one rooted in both justice and the sometimes-violent means necessary to achieve it.
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JULY 2026: Mystery & Thriller Book Club - July 28 @ 7PM
JULY 2026: Mystery & Thriller Book Club - July 28 @ 7PM
$0.00We're meeting to discuss Judge Stone by Viola Davis!
BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS
When: Tuesday, July 28 @ 7PM CST
Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)
How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend! Support the Mystery/Thriller Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!
ABOUT JUDGE STONE
The most respected citizen in Union Springs, Alabama (population 3,314), is Judge Mary Stone. She holds two responsibilities sacred: running her family farm and presiding over her courtroom. It's there she draws the most controversial case in the history of the South.
Criminally, it’s open-and-shut.
Ethically, there is no middle ground. Essentially, it’s a choice between life and death.
No judge can satisfy everyone. It would be dangerous to try. But Judge Stone is willing to fight to bring justice to the people and place she loves. -
JULY 2026: Fiction Book Club - July 30 @ 7PM
JULY 2026: Fiction Book Club - July 30 @ 7PM
$0.00We're meeting to discuss Kin by Tayari Jones!
BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS
When: Thursday, July 30 @ 7PM CST
Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)
How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend! Support the Fiction Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!
ABOUT KIN
A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.
A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in
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Communion
Communion
by bell hooks
Sold outIntimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every female to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey she must choose to be truly free. Silencing our fears about becoming women who love too much, Communion answers all of our questions about the place of love in a woman’s life.
bell hooks explores the ways ideas about women and love were changed by the feminist movement, by women’s full participation in the workforce, by the culture of self-help and by popular media forces such as television and movies. She celebrates the experiences of women over 30, shares collective wisdom, and the lessons learned as we practice the art of loving. Communion is the heart-to-heart talk every woman needs to hear.
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The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
bell hooks
Sold outEveryone needs to love and be loved - even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving.
In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are—whatever their age, marital status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. But toxic masculinity punishes those fundamental emotions, and it’s so deeply ingrained in our society that it’s hard for men to not comply—but hooks wants to help change that.
With trademark candor and fierce intelligence, hooks addresses the most common concerns of men, such as fear of intimacy and loss of their patriarchal place in society, in new and challenging ways. She believes men can find the way to spiritual unity by getting back in touch with the emotionally open part of themselves—and lay claim to the rich and rewarding inner lives that have historically been the exclusive province of women. A brave and astonishing work, The Will to Change is designed to help men reclaim the best part of themselves.
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Belonging : A Culture of Place
Belonging : A Culture of Place
bell hooks
Sold outWhat does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? When can we say that we truly belong? These are some of the questions of place and belonging that renowned cultural critic bell hooks examines in her new book, Belonging: A Culture of Place.
What does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? When can we say that we truly belong?
These are some of the questions of place and belonging that renowned cultural critic bell hooks examines in her new book, Belonging: A Culture of Place. Traversing past and present, Belonging charts a cyclical journey in which hooks moves from place to place, from country to city and back again, only to end where she began--her old Kentucky home.
hooks has written provocatively about race, gender, and class; and in this book she turns her attention to focus on issues of land and land ownership. Reflecting on the fact that 90% of all black people lived in the agrarian South before mass migration to northern cities in the early 1900s, she writes about black farmers, about black folks who have been committed both in the past and in the present to local food production, to being organic, and to finding solace in nature. Naturally, it would be impossible to contemplate these issues without thinking about the politics of race and class. Reflecting on the racism that continues to find expression in the world of real estate, she writes about segregation in housing and economic racialized zoning. In these critical essays, hooks finds surprising connections that link of the environment and sustainability to the politics of race and class that reach far beyond Kentucky.
With characteristic insight and honesty, Belonging offers a remarkable vision of a world where all people--wherever they may call home--can live fully and well, where everyone can belong.
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Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem by bell hooks
Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem by bell hooks
by bell hooks
Sold outWorld-renowned scholar and visionary bell hooks takes an in-depth look at one of the most critical issues facing African Americans: a collective wounded self-esteem that has prevailed from slavery to the present day.
Why do so many African-Americans—whether privileged or poor, urban or suburban, young or old—live in a state of chronic anxiety, fear, and shame? Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem breaks through collective denial and dares to tell this truth—that crippling low self-esteem has reached epidemic proportions in our lives and in our diverse communities. With visionary insight, hooks exposes the underlying reality that it has been difficult—if not impossible—for our nation to create a culture that promotes and sustains healthy self-esteem. Without self-esteem people begin to lose their sense of agency. They feel powerless. They feel they can only be victims. The need for self-esteem never goes away. But it is never too late for any of us to acquire the healthy self-esteem that is needed for a fulfilling life.
hooks gets to the heart and soul of the African-American identity crisis, offering critical insight and hard-won wisdom about what it takes to heal the scars of the past, promote and maintain self-esteem, and lay down the roots for a grounded community with a prosperous future. She examines the way historical movements for racial uplift fail to sustain our quest for self-esteem.
Moving beyond a discussion of race, she identifies diverse barriers keeping us from well-being: the trauma of abandonment, constant shaming, and the loss of personal integrity. In highlighting the role of desegregation, education, the absence of progressive parenting, spiritual crisis, or fundamental breakdowns in communication between black women and men, bell hooks identifies mental health as the new revolutionary frontier—and provides guidance for healing within the black community.
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