An ambitious teen enrolls at an elite science institute in Morbid Curiosities, a young adult thriller from author S. Hati.

When the Institute’s invitation arrived at my doorstep, it felt like it had been inked in my blood, sweat, and tears.

Aarya’s life plan has been set for as long as she can remember: finish high school with a bang, attend the best college she can get into, then land a prestigious biology research job. Her ticket to this dream is a one-year program at the Elizabethan Institute, the preeminent organization for life sciences in the United States, currently on the cusp of revealing a major project that could transform the worlds of biology and medicine.

But as Aarya tries to settle in to a school with sky-high academic expectations and research cloaked in mystery, it becomes clear that someone doesn’t want her there. As the scholarship student surrounded by rich, cutthroat peers who seem all too willing to torment her, she never expected to make friends, but the notes warning her to run rattle her to her core. She finds an ally in Sofia, a mysterious girl who claims to be the subject of closed-door Institute experiments and begs for Aarya’s help in discovering the Institute's true goal.

As rumors of mutated flora and fauna in the nearby city circulate and a murder investigation rocks the Institute, Aarya must navigate Sofia’s growing paranoia and her own increasingly unreliable memory to determine which classmates she can trust―and which would rather see her dead.

"A sharply intelligent, darkly fascinating academic thriller about unraveling the hard truths of who you are and who you want to be - and the final twist made me gasp out loud." ―Andrew Joseph White, New York Times-bestselling and award-winning author of Compound Fracture

The iconic NAACP magazine’s most dynamic and daring African American voices gathered together for the first time in a groundbreaking literary collection, from founding editor W. E. B. DuBois and Jessie Fauset to today's modern day cultural critics, including June Shagaloff and Michael A. Lawrence.

The Crisis magazine is the official publication of NAACP. It was created in 1910 by renowned historian, civil rights activist, and NAACP co-founder W. E. B. DuBois. The magazine appeared three years before Conde Nast launched an American version of Vanity Fair and fifteen years before Harold W. Ross introduced The New Yorker to readers.

Du Bois started The Crisis in one room of the New York Evening Post building in New York City and edited the publication until 1934. A group of NAACP leaders adapted the name from James Russell Lowell's poem The Present Crisis, written at the height of the Civil War.

In the premier issue Du Bois made clear of the publication’s goals: "The Crisis will record important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problem of inter-racial relations, and especially those which affect the Negro-American. Secondly, it will be a review of opinion and literature, recording briefly books, articles, and important expressions of opinion in the white and colored press on the race problem. Thirdly, it will publish a few short articles. Finally, its editorial page will stand for the rights of men, irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of American democracy."

At the time, Du Bois noted, "it was the rule of most white papers never to publish a picture of a colored person except as a criminal and the colored papers published mostly pictures of celebrities who sometimes paid for the honor. In general, the Negro race was just a little afraid to see itself in plain ink." Everything changed with the advent of The Crisis.

Now, for the first time ever The Best of the Crisis will bring together the magazine’s previously published most dynamic and daring voices and stories from its founding until today in one extraordinary collection, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Bayard Rustin, Francis Grimke, J.A. Rogers, Stetson Kennedy, E. Franklin Frazier, Oswald Garrison Villard, Jessie Fauset and Arna Bontemps.

This edition will spotlight the first section devoted to Negro children, the first presentation of Negro artwork, the first feature stories about successful Negroes, the first full-fledged drive for Pan-Africanism, the first special numbers devoted to Negro educational advancement, the first articles on consumers cooperation all tied together with contemporary voices on where we stand on these issues today.

From NAACP Image Award–nominated author Elise Bryant comes a tender, funny novel following a type-A teen whose meticulously coordinated life unravels when she develops a chronic illness.
Jubilee Foster is busy. Between caring for her two younger siblings while her single dad is working, maintaining her perfect GPA, and volunteering at her beloved local community center, she doesn’t have time for trivial things like hobbies or sleep.
And that’s just the way Jubilee likes it. When her to-do list is endless and her color-coded planner is full, it’s easier to ignore the glaring fractures in her life—like her mom’s abandonment, or that her community center is on the brink of closing down for good. Or the reappearance of Neal, her childhood friend turned nemesis, and all of the annoying, distracting feelings he brings.
But then Jubilee starts breaking out in mysterious hives, and her ability to be a perfect student, daughter, sister, and friend begins to fray. As her life buckles under symptoms and side effects, Jubilee will have to tackle the most difficult task on her to-do list yet: accepting help.
Critically acclaimed author Elise Bryant returns with a love letter to eldest daughters, recovering people pleasers, and those managing chronic illnesses in desperate search for the care they deserve.

A new reissue of the acclaimed collection of essays blurring cultural criticism, memoir, even nonfiction itself, from the beloved Pulitzer Prize winner.

White Girls is about, among other things, Blackness, queerness, movies, Brooklyn, love (and the loss of love), AIDS, fashion, Basquiat, Capote, philosophy, porn, Eminem, Louise Brooks, and Michael Jackson. Freewheeling and dazzling, tender and true, it is an invaluable guide to the culture of our time, rendered in Hilton Als’s daring and provocative prose.

Weaving ancestral wisdom with contemporary insight, Black Women Rising speaks directly to Black women’s lived realities of racial trauma, chronic stress, care fatigue, and resilience through a wholistic lens.

Filling a long-standing gap in the self-help and wellness market, Black Women Rising is a culturally grounded, deeply resonant guide created specifically for Black women seeking balance, purpose, and grounding in perilous times. This bold, African-centered book arrives at a moment of profound urgency. Informed by the authors’ expertise in African-centered social work and trauma-informed psychotherapy, each chapter brings to life one of the 18 Principles—rooted in Ma’at and the Nguzo Saba (Kwanzaa)—and closes with an action-oriented exercise readers can immediately apply.

Moving beyond reflection to action, this book offers clear pathways to healing and sustained liberation. Positioned at the intersection of race, gender, and mental health, the book meets a growing demand for self-care that is culturally intentional and affirming. With far-reaching impact in wellness, mental health, and social justice spaces, giving Black women a self-help book that sees and supports their capacity to rise and thrive individually and in community.

Black Women Rising positions healing as sacred and care as a powerful force for renewal and transformation, making it a timely, standout title in wellness, mental health, and cultural nonfiction.

Celebrate the release of If This World We're Mine with Arriel Vinson!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, January 28 @ 7 PM CST

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

How: 

• RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat.

• RSVP WITH BOOK to reserve your seat and purchase a copy If This World We're Mine, supporting both the author and our store programming. The book will be available for pickup at the event.

Please Note: 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 purchase a copy from Kindred Stories.If you already have a copy from Kindred Stories feel free to choose the RSVP only option. 

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arriel Vinson is a Midwesterner who writes about being young, Black, and in search of freedom. Her debut YA novel-in-verse, Under the Neon Lights, is a 2026 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award winner, a Reese’s Book Club LitUp selection, and a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection. Arriel earned her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and is a Tin House YA Scholar, Highlights Foundation scholarship recipient, and Walter Grant recipient. Her sophomore novel, If This World Were Mine, is forthcoming in spring 2027. You can connect with her on social media at @arriwrites and find her work at arriwrites.com

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

LIARA TAMANI grew up in Houston, Texas, where every spring meant one thing: rodeo season. She loved getting decked out in her best cowgirl gear and soaking up the music, food, and electric energy of the rodeo, a joy she now shares with her daughter and husband. Her deep Texas roots shine through her storytelling, capturing the spirit and rhythms of the state in all her acclaimed novels: Calling My Name, All the Things We Never Knew, and What She Missed. Before becoming a writer, she attended Harvard Law School and worked as a marketing coordinator for the Houston Rockets and Comets, television production assistant, home accessories designer, floral designer, and yoga and dance teacher. She holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA from Duke University.

From high fashion to everyday clothes, this book looks at the personal and political importance of Black style from the 1880s to the present.

Both during and after slavery in North America, “Sunday best” referred to clothes reserved for church or special occasions. Dressing in one’s Sunday best conveyed a sense of dignity and self-worth. Sunday best styling evolved after emancipation into the twentieth century, reflecting subsequent periods of Black cultural liberation, empowerment, and upward mobility. It is emblematic of the ways that self-fashioning in African-diasporic communities affirms humanity and communicates identity.

With examples from Canada, the Caribbean, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Sunday Best features archival and contemporary fashion alongside photography, painting, sculpture, and time-based media, looking at the significance of Black style. Essays by an interdisciplinary group of curators, designers, and scholars consider how communities throughout the African diaspora have used style as a reminder of one’s value, visibility, and agency, and the enduring influence of Sunday best dressing on artistic expression.

This richly illustrated volume is organized around the following themes:

• Origins, featuring fashion design by Christopher John Rogers and photography by James Van Der Zee
• Black church, with art by Coreen Simpson, Gordon Parks, and Laura Wheeler Waring
• Migration, through designers such as Foday Dumbuya
• Liberation, with fashion design by Spencer Badu and photography by Chantal Regnault
• Call and response, including fashion design by Patrick Kelly and photography by Melodie McDaniel

Published in association with the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Exhibition Schedule

Art Gallery of Ontario
(October 6, 2026–February 28, 2027)

Philadelphia Museum of Art
(May 1, 2027–August 8, 2027)

From the critically acclaimed and award-winning creators of Crown and I Am Every Good Thing, Derrick Barnes and Gordon C. James, comes an illustrated nonfiction young adult homage to Black athlete activists throughout history.

This is not your typical book about sports. This one begins…
“AN ATHLETE PROTESTING THE MISTREATMENT OF AMERICAN CITIZENS DOES NOT MAKE THEM ANTI-AMERICAN.”
And through a series of powerful poems, freedom-oriented prose, and dynamic illustration, Derrick Barnes and Gordon C. James introduce young readers and change-makers to athletes such as Muhammad Ali, Curt Flood, and Elgin Baylor who used their voices and influence to shake up the landscape of American sports and justice.

* TIMELY AND TOPICAL: Teaches readers about a continued cultural discussion from a resonant and impactful perspective.
* MADE TO CAPTURE THE ATTENTION OF YOUNG READERS: With a mix of prose, poetry, quotes, and illustrations, readers can dive into important history that might otherwise go untold.
* FROM AN AWARD-WINNING TEAM: Caldecott Honoree Gordon C. James and Kirkus Prize, Coretta Scott King Honor, and Newbery Honor recipient Derrick Barnes have teamed up again to create a memorable, impactful, and important book---this time for young adults.

Silver loves to swim and dreams of one day becoming a mermaid. There's only one problem: Her dad can't swim! 

From the bath to the pool and the beach, Silver's always been a water baby. 

She looks like a mermaid, swims like a fish, and even sleeps under the sea. 

Silver and her dad bake mermaid-tail cupcakes, build mermaid caves, and read underwater stories, but he can't join her in the pool like other dads. Silver would rather give up on her mer-mazing dreams than swim away without her dad. But what if she doesn't have to? 

This joyful story celebrates swimming and empowers little dreamers to pursue their passions.

For readers of Nightcrawling, My Absolute Darling, and My Dark Vanessa, this captivating debut centers on nineteen-year-old Keke as she sets out on a desperate quest for freedom and a stable life for herself and her young daughter.

Keke is a young mother living in the basement of a house in Newark, New Jersey under the watchful eye of a man called Daddy. For five years, she has been told that she’ll be able to move upstairs once she and the other “girls” being trafficked hit the magic number. When that happens, she will no longer have to work the motels along the interstate. Her daughter, Angel, will be able to go to school, and Keke will live with Daddy in a real home, like a real family.

But then Keke gets picked up by vice cops and diverted to a women’s shelter, upending the delicate balance of her life. Hope for a new beginning starts shining through the cracks―but she doesn’t trust the system to save her. Unwilling to surrender Angel to foster care, Keke needs to figure out how to get both herself and her daughter to freedom.

Sakinah Hofler’s debut is a taut, incendiary testament to a mother’s love, and an uncompromising evocation of how desperation can drive you through to the light.

A hidden history of twentieth-century American modernity that re-examines a mere twelve-block area on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with Thelonious Monk as its guiding star. 

The Jungles reclaims the largely forgotten world of San Juan Hill, a predominantly Black neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side, was one of the most fertile centers of American cultural life in the twentieth century.

At once a biography, an urban history, and a cultural reckoning, Howard W. French’s The Jungles reveals how the neighborhood that would encompass Lincoln Center, previously known as the Jungles, fostered numerous pathbreaking Black artists, among them a young Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917–1982).

The story opens in Cuba in 1898, where we watch as Teddy Roosevelt’s forces triumph on San Juan Hill, with close to one-fifth of the overall invading force consisting of Black soldiers whose valor went largely unrecognized. After returning to the US, these veterans joined a broader wave of Black migrants moving northward, eventually settling in a Manhattan -neighborhood that would take the battle’s name. San Juan Hill became a lively, artistic Black community that preceded the Harlem Renaissance and inspired some of the highest twentieth- century creative triumphs―giving rise to the stride piano style and nurturing the genius of Monk, whose mold-breaking artistry struggled to gain traction in an industry then dominated by white producers.

As Robert Moses began tearing down the neighborhood under the guise of “urban renewal,” Monk became its most famous holdout, staying put in his cramped apartment in the Phipps Houses at 243 West 63rd Street, his upright piano protruding from his bedroom into the kitchen as he continued to make his iconic music.

By the late 1950s, Monk’s genius had finally been recognized, but the erasure already felt irreversible, extending even to the musical West Side Story, which reimagined the neighborhood’s streets as Latino gang territory, whitewashing the predominantly Black and Caribbean community that had actually lived there.

A compelling history from one of our finest American historians, The Jungles ultimately emerges as a new way of telling the history of music, of New York, and of America. The cradle of jazz was not only in New Orleans but also in San Juan Hill, and French’s magnificent recreation of that vanished world, and of the miraculous life of Thelonious Monk, restores to American cultural memory what erasure nearly stole for good.

12 illustrations

“Engrossing and informative.” ―Zaakir Tameez, New York Times Book Review

From one of the most acclaimed and influential historians of the United States, an insightful guide to our history and why it matters.

Eric Foner has done more to shape the public and professional understanding of American history than any other scholar. The preeminent historian of the Civil War era, Foner’s keynote has been American freedom and the recurring battles over its meanings and boundaries. His award-winning works show that freedom has been a birthright for some and a struggle for others, that rights gained can also be lost, and that they must always be tended with knowledge and vigilance. The present political moment makes the importance of these themes abundantly clear.

This collection of Foner’s recent reviews and commentaries demonstrates the range of his interests and expertise, running from slavery and antislavery, through the disunion and remaking of the United States in the nineteenth century, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, and into our current politics. Each piece shows a master at work, melding historical knowledge and balanced judgment with crystalline prose. Foner takes up towering figures from Washington to Lincoln, Douglass, and Rosa Parks, pivotal events such as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the fragility of constitutional guarantees to civil liberties, due process, and birthright citizenship, whether in times of war or peace. He also explores recent controversies over how to commemorate, and how to teach, our history.