A rediscovered classic from the Harlem Renaissance about a young Black woman’s journey passing as white in 1920s New York City and her quest for self-acceptance—with an introduction by Glory Edim, founder and author of Well-Read Black Girl.

Jessie Redmon Fauset is one of the literary titans and foremost tastemakers of the Harlem Renaissance—hired by W. E. B. Du Bois to edit The Crisis, she helped popularize writers like Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, amongst countless others. And yet, her own work has been largely underread in the twenty-first century. Written in 1929, at the height of the Harlem renaissance, Fauset’s celebrated second novel tells the story of Angela Murray.
 
Growing up in a Black middle-class Philadelphia neighborhood, Angela has always dreamed of becoming a painter. But the profession is largely reserved for white society. So when Angela’s parents prematurely pass away, she moves to roaring New York City, where she befriends elite artists and presents herself as a white woman. While her sister Virginia’s complexion resembles that of their father’s, Angela’s is lighter, like her mother’s, and passing, she believes, is the only way she’ll ever achieve success. Virginia, meanwhile, refuses to bow to racist pressures, and stays in Philadelphia to embrace her heritage with pride. 
 
Each time Angela thinks she’s found artistic, professional, and romantic fulfillment, her ethnicity gets exposed and she finds herself stripped of everything she cares about. As she navigates a world of seduction, betrayal, lust, and heartbreak, she’s forced to consider: What does it mean to find genuine success in a society marred by injustice? Fauset’s “novel without morals” never passes judgement and stays teeming with tenderness. Full of moments that underline the joy of every day Black life, Plum Bun is a pertinent meditation on art, identity, and what it means to find community—as relevant today as ever before.

Asserts how Black artists and activists developed a disability consciousness in response to racialized disabling experiences in the early to mid-twentieth century

Black Crip Modern uncovers how early twentieth-century Black writers, artists, and activists laid the groundwork for modern disability consciousness. Under Jim Crow, Black disabled citizens were excluded from social services and medical reforms, even as racist violence, carceral surveillance, eugenic logic, and exploitative labor conditions deepened disabling experiences. Through literature, film, photography, and personal testimony, Black modernists registered these compounded injustices and articulated new ways of thinking about illness, impairment, and care.

Engaging the work of figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Pauli Murray, Langston Hughes and Marita Bonner, Jess Waggoner traces how Black cultural production challenged both white supremacy and ableist ideals of progress. In their writing, Waggoner finds an early “Black crip modern” consciousness―one that rejected eugenic reform, critiqued racialized caregiving hierarchies, and envisioned collective care grounded in feminist and anti-carceral principles.

In conversation with contemporary disability justice movements, Black Crip Modern reveals how Black thinkers and artists forged a disability politics before it was formally named. By assembling these overlooked histories of Black ill and disabled life, Waggoner reframes the foundations of disability studies and insists that Black cultural production has always been central to the struggle for bodily autonomy, access, and justice.

Celebrate the release of Good Spirits with Tiffanie Barriere! This special evening will feature an author conversation with Tiffanie and Chef Dominic Lee, owner of Augustine’s, followed by a cocktail tasting featuring recipes from the book. Join us for an engaging evening of conversation, cocktails, and good spirits!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, December 10 @ 7PM

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

How: 

• RSVP ONLY
  Reserve your seat and participate in the tasting.

  RSVP WITH BOOK
  Reserve your seat and purchase a copy of Good Spirits, supporting both the author and our store programming. Your book will be available for pickup at the event. Includes the tasting.

  RSVP (I ALREADY HAVE THE BOOK)
  Reserve your seat and let us know you plan to bring a copy of Good Spirits that you previously purchased from another bookseller. Includes the tasting.

Please Note: Generally books purchased from other retailers are not permitted in the bookstore and are not eligible for the signing or photo line. To participate in the signing and photo opportunity, you must either purchase a copy from Kindred Stories or select the RSVP: I Already Have the Book ticket option, which allows you to bring a copy purchased elsewhere. If you already purchased your book from Kindred Stories, you may select the RSVP Only ticket option and bring your Kindred Stories copy to the event.

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

The must-have companion for classic cocktails, mocktails, and creative drinks, plus historical insights, from a celebrated industry icon.

Good Spirits is a culture-rich cocktail exploration that seamlessly blends practiced technique with deep historical knowledge. For master bartender and cocktail educator Tiffanie Barriere, the bar has always been a place where history, creativity, and community combine. From gold-standard martinis and expert Manhattans to drinks inspired by mood, the cocktail curious will learn not only how to skillfully mix and pour with joy, but also about the fascinating and often untold history behind our favorite drinks and spirits.

In addition to the backstories and recipes for 125 cocktails, enthusiasts will find illuminating essays about choosing and using spirits and the legacies (both bitter and sweet) behind them; important historical figures who invented our favorite drinks, liqueurs, and bar tools; and truths that track the impact of trends and cocktail movements. Zero-proof variations abound thanks to the ingenious concept of cocktail “stock”, while dozens of bold-flavored syrups, shrubs, and infusions make it just as easy and exciting to take a drink in a no-alcohol direction as a boozy one. Insights on tools, garnishing, ice types, and the difference between shaking, rolling, and aerating set you up to hone your mixology and make drinks with confidence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tiffanie Barriere is a bartender’s bartender and award-winning mixologist, educator, and hospitality leader. The former beverage director at One Flew South, the “Best Airport Bar in the World,” she has been honored as a Food & Wine Game Changer and a Tales of the Cocktail Visionary Award recipient. She has contributed cocktail recipes to several cocktail books and cookbooks, including Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs & Juice and Modern Classic Cocktails. Her work has also been featured in Imbibe, Forbes, Essence, and Southern Living. She is based in Atlanta, Georgia.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Rooted in the unique tapestry of Creole culture, Chef Dominick Lee’s culinary journey pays heartfelt homage to his New Orleans heritage. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Lee’s passion for cooking led him to The Art Institute of Houston, where he received the inaugural “Underbelly Scholarship” from James Beard award-winning chef Chris Shepherd. His journey to his Bachelors in Culinary Management included roles as sous chef at Bay Oaks Country Club, Executive Sous Chef under James Beard semifinalist Chef Kiran Verma at Kiran’s and stages at some of the most highly acclaimed restaurants in the country, including Alinea (2 Michelin Stars), Next (1 Michelin Star), and Blue Hill at Stone Barns (2 Michelin Stars). At 29, Lee became one of the youngest executive chefs in Houston, taking the helm at Poitín Bar & Kitchen where he earned accolades such as Texas Monthly’s 2019 Best New Restaurants and a number of “Rising Star Chef” distinctions.

In 2021, Lee relocated to Europe to study Creole food derivatives and served as head chef at Villa Lena in Tuscany. Two years later, he returned back to The States, opening Alligator Pear in New York City, which showcased a New American menu inspired by New Orleans. Now, Lee has returned to Houston to open Augustine’s, a progressive Creole restaurant exploring the many dimensions of his Creole heritage — debuting Summer 2026.

Gail Simmons will be in conversation with Chris Shepherd on November 17th at the Hobby Center as part of her official book tour.  Get tickets HERE!

From author, culinary expert, and Top Chef judge Gail Simmons comes a fun, informative, and trailblazing guide to a rarely-explored side of hospitality: how to be a great guest.

Countless influential voices have written books about hosting, offering tips for what to cook, how to set the perfect table, mix the best drinks and create the most welcoming vibes. But hospitality, by definition, involves at least two people; where is the advice for guests?

Culinary expert and perennial Top Chef judge Gail Simmons is something of a professional on the subject. As a tastemaker and lifestyle authority, she is invited to countless social events running the gamut from world-class fine dining and international affairs to neighborhood potlucks. Through it all, she knows that for any gathering to be a success, guests must rise to the occasion and actively embrace their role.

In Guesting, Gail unpacks the reciprocal nature of this relationship and explores the sometimes-tricky choreography that governs its dance. She also shares her essential tenets of guesting, and proven strategies for navigating any social situation (yes, even assigned seating). From dinner parties to weddings, religious observances to restaurants, Guesting guides readers through all types of “get-togethers” with confidence and grace. It also connects the vital role guesting plays in our wellbeing and the integrity of our collective culture, at a moment when technology and the temptation for short-term comfort have diminished our inherent need to create―and maintain―human relationships.

And since any good guest knows that bringing something to the table is always the right move, Gail shares ideas and recipes for thoughtful store-bought contributions, homemade food gifts, and favorite dishes to share with a crowd. Whether you’re visiting an old friend, going out for dinner, or attending a milestone celebration, Gail has the answers and inspiration to help you become the consummate guest.

Langston Hughes's debut novel, a moving portrait of African American family life in 1930s Kansas, newly reissued for Union Square & Co.’s Herald Classics line.

Originally published in 1930, Not Without Laughter follows Sandy Rogers as a boy living in rural Kansas to his arrival in Chicago as a young man, set against a backdrop of poverty, racial segregation, and the onset of World War I. Orbiting Sandy are a host of vividly realized family members, including his mother Annjee, a housekeeper for a wealthy white family; his irresponsible father Jimboy, who plays guitar and is constantly in search of work; his aunts, blues-singing Aunt Harriet and social-climbing Aunt Tempy; and his pious, strong-willed grandmother Hager, who holds the generations together.

Partly inspired by Langston Hughes’s early life in the Midwest, Not Without Laughter is the debut novel of the literary giant, a sweeping and elegiac family drama that traces Black life in the early twentieth century, an important setting in the history of a racially divided America.

A major hardcover compendium of poetry and fiction by the legendary Black American poet of the Harlem Renaissance

One of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes may be best known as a poet, but he was also a brilliant storyteller, blending elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom. Perhaps more than any other writer, Langston Hughes made the white America of the 1920s and 1930s aware of the Black culture thriving in its midst. Hughes's poetry and fiction works are messages from that America, sharply etched vignettes of its daily life, cruelly accurate portrayals of Black and white collisions.

This Everyman's Library compendium comprises Hughes's debut poetry collection, The Weary Blues, which catapulted him into literary stardom at just twenty-four years old; his award-winning debut novel, Not Without Laughter, published in 1930 to critical raves; and his 1933 collection of short stories The Ways of White Folks, currently only available in Vintage Classics trade paperback.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

A landmark book—the first complete publication of Langston Hughes’s translations of thirty-three stories by eighteen Mexican and Cuban writers

In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than five months and began translating short fiction by prominent Mexican and Cuban writers. These stories, as he wrote to a friend, explore “the revolutions and uprisings, sugar cane, Negroes, Indians, corrupt generals, [and] American imperialists,” and are “mostly all left stories, because practically all the writers down here are left these days.” But when Hughes proposed publishing the stories as a book, to be titled Troubled Lands, his agent discouraged him from further pursuing the project and it remained unpublished, until now, with only a handful of the translations making their way into contemporary magazines. This volume presents Hughes’s translations of these stories together for the first time as he originally envisioned. Edited by Ricardo Wilson, the book also features an introduction and brief biographies of the included writers.

Troubled Lands features thirty-three stories by eighteen writers, including Rafael Felipe Muñoz, Nellie Campobello, Lino Novás Calvo, Luis Felipe Rodríguez, Germán List Arzubide, Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, and Juan de la Cabada. The collection depicts Mexico in the wake of its revolution and Cuba in the years between the brutal regimes of Machado and Batista.

Hughes was a noted translator of poetry, but his commitment to translating fiction is less well known. Troubled Lands provides a window into this important dimension of his work and illuminates his deep interest in Mexico and Cuba.

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s.

His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. It is the continuously amusing, wise revelation of an American writer journeying around the often strange and always exciting world he loves.

*Ships/ready for pick-up in 7-10 business days*

New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Jason Reynolds’s debut picture book is a snappy, joyous ode to Word King, literary genius, and glass-ceiling smasher Langston Hughes and the luminaries he inspired.

Back in the day, there was a heckuva party, a jam, for a word-making man. The King of Letters. Langston Hughes. His ABCs became drums, bumping jumping thumping like a heart the size of the whole country. They sent some people yelling and others, his word-children, to write their own glory.

Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, and more came be-bopping to recite poems at their hero’s feet at that heckuva party at the Schomberg Library, dancing boom da boom, stepping and stomping, all in praise and love for Langston, world-mending word man. Oh, yeah, there was hoopla in Harlem, for its Renaissance man. A party for Langston.

*Use discount code SALE at checkout for 30% *

This beloved poem by Langston Hughes, illustrated by the award-winning Sean Qualls, is an irresistible celebration of the love between mother and baby, now available in board book format.

“My little dark baby, / My little earth-thing, / My little love-one, / What shall I sing / For your lullaby?" With gracefully chosen words as smooth as a song, the poet Langston Hughes celebrates the love between an African American mother and her baby. Award-winning illustrator Sean Qualls’s painted and collaged artwork captures universally powerful maternal moments with tenderness and whimsy. Like little love-ones, this beautiful book is a treasure. Now in board book format.

An authoritative anthology tracing the history of one of the most important concepts Black people drew on to challenge the brutal, totalizing system of Jim Crow racism

This book brings together a wealth of readings on the metaphor of the “New Negro,” charting how generations of thinkers debated its meaning and seized on its potency to stake out an astonishingly broad and sometimes contradictory range of ideological positions. It features dozens of newly unearthed pieces by major figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, and Drusilla Dunjee Houston as well as writings from Cuba, the US Virgin Islands, Dominica, France, Sierra Leone, South Africa, colonial Zimbabwe, and the United States. Demonstrating how this evocative and supremely protean concept predates its popularization in Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology of the same name, The New Negro takes readers from its beginnings as a response to Henry Grady’s famous “New South” address in 1886 through the Harlem Renaissance and the New Deal.

Opening a fascinating window into a largely unexplored chapter in African American, Afro-Latin American, and African intellectual history, this groundbreaking anthology includes writings by Gwendolyn Bennett, Marita Bonner, John Edward Bruce (“Bruce Grit”), Nannie Helen Burroughs, Charles W. Chesnutt, James Bertram Clarke (“José Clarana,” “Jaime Gil”), Anna Julia Cooper, Alexander Crummell, Countee Cullen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Marcus Garvey, Hubert Harrison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, D. Hamilton Jackson, Fenton Johnson, Claude McKay, Oscar Micheaux, Jeanne “Jane” Nardal, Jean Toomer, Gustavo Urrutia, Booker T. Washington, Dorothy West, Ruth Whitehead Whaley, Fannie Barrier Williams, Carter G. Woodson, and a host of others.

Celebrate the release of Harlem Rhapsody with Victoria Christopher Murray!

EVENT DEETS

When: Wednesday, February 5 @ 7PM

Where: Holy Family HTX (3719 Navigation Blvd, HTX, 77003) 

How: Get your tickets here! 

ABOUT THE BOOK

In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Amidst rumors of their tumultuous affair, Jessie is determined to prove herself. She attacks the challenge of discovering young writers with fervor, finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends. Under Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives…every African American writer in the country wants their work published there.

When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater, and the arts. She has shaped a generation of literary legends, but as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Victoria Christopher Murray is one of the country's top Black contemporary authors. Her novels include the Seven Deadly Sins series and Stand Your Ground, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

As a national bestselling author and award-winning journalist, ReShonda Tate has the credentials, and the passion, to bring stories to life.  A highly sought-after motivational speaker/poet, ReShonda is a three-time nominee and previous winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. She has received a plethora of distinguished awards and honors for her journalism, fiction, and poetry writing skills, including an induction into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame and the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. Two of her novels have been made into television movies.