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  • The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

    by James Weldon Johnson

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    A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of the groundbreaking classic novel of the Black experience in America that is still remarkably relevant more than a century later.

    First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards—and double consciousness—experienced by Black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man became a pioneering document of African-American culture and an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.

    Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to "pass" for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of Black society at the turn of the century—from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of ragtime. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a complex and moving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what it meant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing but color.

    Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored 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. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
  • IRL Author Talk: This Could Be Us with Kennedy Ryan - March 10 @ 2PM
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    Celebrate Kennedy Ryan's new book, This Could Be Us!

    EVENT DEETS

    When: Sunday, March 10 at 2 PM

    Where: Eldorado Ballroom (2310 Elgin Street, HTX, 77004)

    How: Purchase your ticket here! Each ticket comes with a copy of This Could Be Us. No refunds.

    ABOUT THE BOOK 

    Soledad Barnes has her life all planned out. Because, of course, she does. She plans everything. She designs everything. She fixes everything. She’s a domestic goddess who's never met a party she couldn't host or a charge she couldn't lead. The one with all the answers and the perfect vinaigrette for that summer salad. But none of her varied talents can save her when catastrophe strikes, and the life she built with the man who was supposed to be her forever, goes poof in a cloud of betrayal and disillusion.
     
    But there is no time to pout or sulk, or even grieve the life she lost. She's too busy keeping a roof over her daughters' heads and food on the table. And in the process of saving them all, Soledad rediscovers herself. From the ashes of a life burned to the ground, something bold and new can rise.
     
    But then an unlikely man enters the picture—the forbidden one, the one she shouldn't want but can't seem to resist. She's lost it all before and refuses to repeat her mistakes. Can she trust him? Can she trust herself?
     
    After all she's lost . . .and found . . .can she be brave enough to make room for what could be?

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

    USA Today bestselling author and Audie Award winner, Kennedy Ryan writes for women from all walks of life, empowering them and placing them firmly at the center of each story and in charge of their own destinies. Kennedy and her writings have been featured in USA Today, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Glamour, Cosmo, TIME, and many others. The co-founder of LIFT 4 Autism, an annual charitable book auction, she has a passion for raising Autism awareness. She is a wife to her "lifetime lover" and mother to an extraordinary son.

    ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

    Wale Okerayi is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor working with folks in New York and Texas. She has a double masters degree in mental health counseling from Teachers College Columbia University. After practicing in New York for a few years, Wale moved back to her hometown Houston and started her own therapy practice in 2020. Wale currently works with individuals and couples, writers and creative folks on a weekly basis.

    As an avid reader and Kindred Stories aficionado, Wale has moderated various author talks featuring: Lyvonne Briggs, Sochil Washington, Tyriek White, Adorah Nworah, Dr. Joy, and Nicole Walters. 

  • Hip-Hop Is History
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    Hip-Hop Is History is a book only Questlove could have written: a perceptive and personal reflection on the first half-century of hip-hop.

    When hip-hop first emerged in the 1970s, it wasn’t expected to become the cultural force it is today. But for a young Black kid growing up in a musical family in Philadelphia, it was everything. He stayed up late to hear the newest songs on the radio. He saved his money to buy vinyl as soon as it landed. He even started to try to make his own songs. That kid was Questlove, and decades later, he is a six-time Grammy Award–winning musician, an Academy Award–winning filmmaker, a New York Times bestselling author, a producer, an entrepreneur, a cofounder of one of hip-hop’s defining acts (the Roots), and the genre’s unofficial in-house historian.

    In this landmark book, Hip-Hop Is History, Questlove skillfully traces the creative and cultural forces that made and shaped hip-hop, highlighting both the forgotten but influential gems and the undeniable chart-topping hits—and weaves it all together with the stories no one else knows. It is at once an intimate, sharply observed story of a cultural revolution and a sweeping, grand theory of the evolution of the great artistic movement of our time. And Questlove, of course, approaches it with not only the encyclopedic fluency and passion of an obsessive fan but also the expertise and originality of an innovative participant.

    Hip-hop is history, and also his history.

  • The Power of Our cover image
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    A First Folktale from the creators of Magnolia Flower, Zora Neale Hurston and Ibram X. Kendi, about the power of sharing.

    There was a cat. And there was a dog. And only one piece of pineapple…

    Find out if the two animals can overcome this conundrum in Zora Neale Hurston's humorous and charming folktale retold by #1 New York Times bestselling and National Book Award–winning author Ibram X. Kendi and illustrated by New York Times honored artist, Diana Ejaita. This accessible and sizable board book is perfect for introducing the youngest of readers to the beauty of Hurston's storytelling and will lightly teach children that everything is better shared when with friends.

  • Take My Hand

    by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

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    A searing and compassionate new novel about a young Black nurse’s shocking discovery and burning quest for justice in post-segregation Alabama, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench.

    Montgomery, Alabama, 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend intends to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she hopes to help women shape their destinies, to make their own choices for their lives and bodies.

    But when her first week on the job takes her along a dusty country road to a worn-down one-room cabin, Civil is shocked to learn that her new patients, Erica and India, are children—just eleven and thirteen years old. Neither of the Williams sisters has even kissed a boy, but they are poor and Black, and for those handling the family’s welfare benefits, that’s reason enough to have the girls on birth control. As Civil grapples with her role, she takes India, Erica, and their family into her heart. Until one day she arrives at their door to learn the unthinkable has happened, and nothing will ever be the same for any of them.

    Decades later, with her daughter grown and a long career in her wake, Dr. Civil Townsend is ready to retire, to find her peace, and to leave the past behind. But there are people and stories that refuse to be forgotten. That must not be forgotten.

    Because history repeats what we don’t remember.

    Inspired by true events and brimming with hope, Take My Hand is a stirring exploration of accountability and redemption.

  • A History of Burning

    by Janika Oza

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    This epic, sweeping historical novel full of "wondrous complexity” spans continents and a century, and reveals how one act of survival can reverberate through generations (Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin). ​

    “Remarkable….a haunting, symphonic tale”— New York Times Book Review

    In 1898, Pirbhai, a teenage boy looking for work, is taken from his village in India to labor for the British on the East African Railway. Far from home, Pirbhai commits a brutal act in the name of survival that will haunt him and his family for years to come.

    So begins Janika Oza’s masterful, richly told epic, where the embers of this desperate act are fanned into flame over four generations, four continents, throughout the twentieth century. Pirbhai’s children are born in Uganda during the waning days of British colonial rule, and as the country moves toward independence, his granddaughters, three sisters, come of age in a divided nation. Latika is an aspiring journalist, who will put everything on the line for what she believes in; Mayuri’s ambitions will take her farther away from home than she ever imagined; and fearless Kiya will have to carry the weight of her family’s silence and secrets.

    In 1972, the entire family is forced to flee under Idi Amin’s military dictatorship. Pirbhai’s grandchildren are now scattered across the world, struggling to find their way back to each other. One day a letter arrives with news that makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy, to secure their own place in the world.

    A History of Burning is an unforgettable tour de force, an intimate family saga of complicity and resistance, about the stories we share, the ones that remain unspoken, and the eternal search for home.
  • Facing the Unseen: Centering Mental Health in Medicine cover image
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    From the New York Times bestselling author of Black Man in a White Coat comes a powerful and urgent call to center psychiatry and mental health care within mainstream medicine

    As much as we all might wish that mental health problems--with their elusive causes and unsettling behaviors--simply did not exist, millions of people suffer from them, sometimes to an extreme extent. Many others face addiction to alcohol and other drugs, as overdose and suicide deaths abound. Yet the vast majority of doctors receive minimal instruction during their lengthy medical training in treating these conditions. This mismatch ignores the clear overlap between physical and mental distress, and too-often puts psychiatrists on the outside looking in as the medical system continues to fail many patients.

    In Facing The Unseen, bestselling author, professor of psychiatry, and practicing physician Damon Tweedy guides us through his days working in outpatient clinics, emergency rooms, and hospitals as he meets people from all walks of life who are grappling with physical and psychological illnesses. In powerful, compassionate, and eloquent prose, Tweedy argues for a more comprehensive and integrated approach, one in which people with mental illness have access to a health care system that places their full well-being front and center.

  • Rashid Johnson

    edited by Claudia Rankine, Sampada Aranke & Akili Tommasino

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    The most comprehensive publication to date on widely celebrated artist Rashid Johnson

    ‘Johnson is a leading voice of his generation.’ – New York Times

    The most comprehensive publication to date on widely celebrated artist Rashid Johnson

    Working with a variety of media that includes painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance, Rashid Johnson has created a nuanced and iconographic body of work that connects literature, music, and art. Personal references and pervasive cultural narratives are interweaved with the legacy of modernist abstraction, producing what critics have labelled ‘conceptual post-black art’. A precocious talent (his work was included in the seminal ‘Freestyle’ exhibition in New York in 2001), Johnson received the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Prize, which honours contributions in the field of African-American art.

  • Book cover image

    Monika Kim

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    PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: March 31, 2026

    “Violent, smart, gruesome and wildly original, this novel pulls readers into a horrific world of murder and cannibalism while also critiquing misogyny, exploring Asian fetishization and stereotypes, sharing what it’s like to navigate two cultures and telling a touching story of a family in turmoil.” —New York Times Book Review

    TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR

    Crying in H-Mart meets My Sister, the Serial Killer in this brilliantly subversive, feminist psychological horror novel about the making of a female serial killer from a Korean-American perspective.

    Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her Appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying . . . yet enticing.

    In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Mouthwatering blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescendingly toward Ji-won and her sister, as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. But George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that.

    No matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.

    "I was enticed from the first line and entertained throughout. The Eyes Are the Best Part is a quirky, engaging read."—Oyinkan Brainthwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer

  • IRL Author Talk: Sink with Joseph Earl Thomas & Kiese Laymon-March 22 at 7PM CST
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    Come out and welcome author, Joseph Earl Thomas to Houston as he celebrates the release of his book, Sink: A Memoir.

    EVENT DEETS

    When: March 22 at 7 PM CST

    Where: Kindred Stories' Reading Garden (2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004)

    How: RSVP ONLY to grab a free ticket or RSVP WITH BOOK to reserve your copy of Sink and support this Black owned bookstore and its programming. 

    About the Book

    "A brilliant and brilliantly different" (Kiese Laymon), wrenching and redemptive coming-of-age memoir about the difficulty of growing up in a hazardous home and the glory of finding salvation in geek culture.

    Stranded within an ever-shifting family’s desperate but volatile attempts to love, saddled with a mercurial mother mired in crack addiction, and demeaned daily for his perceived weakness, Joseph Earl Thomas grew up feeling he was under constant threat. Roaches fell from the ceiling, colonizing bowls of noodles and cereal boxes. Fists and palms pounded down at school and at home, leaving welts that ached long after they disappeared. An inescapable hunger gnawed at his frequently empty stomach, and requests for food were often met with indifference if not open hostility. Deemed too unlike the other boys to ever gain the acceptance he so desperately desired, he began to escape into fantasy and virtual worlds, wells of happiness in a childhood assailed on all sides.

    In a series of exacting and fierce vignettes, Thomas guides readers through the unceasing cruelty that defined his circumstances, laying bare the depths of his loneliness and illuminating the vital reprieve geek culture offered him. With remarkable tenderness and devastating clarity, he explores how lessons of toxic masculinity were drilled into his body and the way the cycle of violence permeated the very fabric of his environment. Even in the depths of isolation, there were unexpected moments of joy carved out, from summers where he was freed from the injurious structures of his surroundings to the first glimpses of kinship he caught on his journey to becoming a Pokémon master. SINK follows Thomas's coming-of-age towards an understanding of what it means to lose the desire to fit in—with his immediate peers, turbulent family, or the world—and how good it feels to build community, love, and salvation on your own terms.

    About the Author

    Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from The University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of his memoir, Sink, won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, Kimbilio, & Breadloaf, though he is now the Anisfield-Wolf Fellow at the CSU Poetry Center. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories: Leviathan Beach, among other oddities. He is also an associate faculty member at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, as well as Director of Programs at Blue Stoop, a literary hub for Philly writers.

    About Conversation Partner

    Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libby 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. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. LaHe 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. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.


  • Book cover image

    by Ralph Ellison

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    *Use discount code SALE at checkout for 30% *

    From the renowned author of Invisible Man,a classic, “elegant” (The New York Times) collection of essays that captures the breadth and complexity of his insights into racial identity, jazz and folklore, and citizenship across six decades. Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this definitive volume includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that Black Americans lead. With newly discovered essays and speeches, The Collected Essays reveals a more vulnerable, intimate side of Ellison than what we've previously seen. “Raph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”

  • Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert: A Novel cover image
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    THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

    Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of 2025 by Pride • Best New Books of Spring 2025 by Bustle • Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by LitHub • Biggest Books of March by Book Riot • Most Anticipated Books of March by Goodreads

    Featuring two new songs written for the audiobook and performed by Bob the Drag Queen!

    “Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert is magnificent! I want to send to the folks who do the Nobel Prize for Literature. I don’t know them, but I want them to read this!” —Whoopi Goldberg

    “It’s a knockout.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

    “An emotional exploration of religion, external and internalized homophobia, the pressure of progressing Black liberation, and the importance of revisiting the past.” —New York magazine

    From RuPaul’s Drag Race winner, Traitors contestant, and host of HBO’s We’re Here comes an inventive, wondrous novel about American hero Harriet Tubman that remixes history into a fresh, dynamic novel about love, freedom, salvation, and hip-hop.

    In an age of miracles where our greatest heroes from history have magically, unexplainably returned to shake us out of our confusion and hate, Harriet Tubman is back, and she has a lot to say.

    Harriet Tubman and four of the enslaved persons she led to freedom want to tell their story in a unique way. Harriet wants to create a hip-hop album and live show about her life, and she needs a songwriter to help her.

    She calls upon Darnell, a once successful hip-hop producer who was topping the charts before being outed on a BET talk show. Darnell has no idea what to expect when he steps into the studio with Harriet, only that they have a short period of time to write a legendary album she can take on the road. Over the course of their time together, they not only create music that will take the country by storm, but confront the horrors of both their pasts, and learn to find a way to a better future.

    Original, evocative, and historic, Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert is a landmark achievement that will burrow deep into our hearts (and ears).

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