9 results for “violet allen”

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  • Plastic, Prism, Void: Part One cover image
    $19.95

    A magical girl-gone-bad and a renegade mech pilot must stay on a date forever, even if it means destroying the world. Don't you want to help them?

    A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2026 • A them Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of 2026

    "Delicious, insane, intoxicating." —Maya Deane, author of Wrath Goddess Sing

    "This Is How You Lose the Time War but on crack." —Jace Molloy

    Acrasia is in the ultimate long-distance relationship: with Opus Zhao, a man from another universe. She was a trans girl who was also an intergalactic moth-goddess. He was a trans guy who piloted a giant robotic tiger. They hated each other, then fell in love, then their universes moved apart. Now, years later, he's turned up in her dimension again. What won’t she do to keep him there? 

    Combining Sailor Moon, Sex and the City, and House of Leaves, this riotous enemies-to-lovers romantasy roars off the page in the genre-exploding, galaxy-spanning, quick-quipping retro nostalgia futuristic thrill ride of a lifetime. Give in, succumb (you know you want to) to the unstoppable world of Plastic, Prism, Void.

  • JULY 2026: NO NAME BOOK CLUB - JuLY 26 @ 3 PM CST
    $0.00
    No 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 DEETS
    When: Sunday, July 26 @ 3 PM
    Where: 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 TEARS

    A 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.

  • JULY 2026: Romance Book Club - July 8 @ 7PM
    $0.00

    We'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

  • JULY 2026: Horror Book Club - July 21 @ 7PM
    $0.00

    We'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.

  • JULY 2026: Mystery & Thriller Book Club - July 28 @ 7PM
    $0.00

    We'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
    $0.00

    We'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 

  • Virtual Author Talk: Love Songs of W.E.B DuBois with Honoree Fanonne Jeffers & Jacqueline Allen Trimble-May 10 @7PM CST
    Sold out

    Come celebrate the paperback release of The Long Songs of W.E.B DuBois with author, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers & Jacqueline Allen Tremble. 

    Event Deets

    When: May 10 at 7PM CST

    Where: Virtual via Crowdcast

    How: Register on this page or head over to register on Crowdcast directly using this link.  If you register using our website (with or without purchasing the book) and not Crowdcast, you will register a Crowdcast watch link at least 24 hours before the start of the event.

    About the Book

    “My life had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a Problem,” W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood these words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother, the descendant of slaves and tenant farmers—Ailey carries the weight of this Problem on her shoulders.

    The daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, Ailey is raised in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. Growing up, she struggles with this duality, a battle for belonging that shapes her identity. On one side are her exacting parents and her imperious, light-skinned grandmother Nana Claire, to whom skin color is paramount. On the other, Ailey feels the pull of the “deep country” of her mother’s land-tending family, whose forebears endured the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow.

    But how can Ailey live up to everyone’s expectations when half of her family rejects the truth of a fraught racial history, while the rest can’t ever seem to break away from it?

    About the Author

    Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections, including the 2020 NBA-nominated collection The Age of Phillis. She was a contributor to The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward, and has been published in the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and other literary publications. Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, whose members include fourteen U.S. presidents, and is Critic at Large for Kenyon Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at University of Oklahoma.

    About the Moderator

     JACQUELINE ALLEN TRIMBLE lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is  a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. She a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow and a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in various online and print publications including The Griot, The Offing, The Louisville Review,  and Blue Lake Review.  American Happiness (2016), her first collection, published by NewSouth Books, won the Balcones Poetry Prize.   Trimble's next collection, How to Survive the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from NewSouth Books in fall of 2022.

  • IRL Author Talk: Perish with LaToya Watkins & Kendra Allen- August 25 @ 7PM CST
    Sold out
    Come celebrate the release of Perish, LaToya Watkin's debut novel. 
    Event DEETS: 
    When: August 25 at 7PM CST
    Where: Assembly HTX (2015 Berry Street, Houston, TX 77004)
    How: Grab a $5 ticket without a book or support our store, programming and the author by purchasing a book with your ticket. Limited seating available. 
    About the Book 
    From a stunning new voice, comes a powerful and moving debut novel and sweeping family saga, PERISH, about a Black Texan family, exploring the effects of inherited trauma and intragenerational violence as the family comes together to say goodbye to their matriarch on her deathbed.

    Bear it or Perish. Those are the words Helen Jean hears that fateful night in her cousin’s outhouse that changes the trajectory of her life.  
     
    Spanning decades, PERISH tracks the choices Helen Jean—the matriarch of the Turner family—makes and the way those choices have ripped across generations, from her children, to her grandchildren and beyond.
    Told in in alternate chapters that follows four members of the Turner clan: Julie B., a woman who regrets her wasted youth and the time spent under Helen Jean's thumb; Alex, a police officer grappling with a dark and twisted past; Jan, mother of two, who yearns to go to school and leave Jerusalem and all of its trauma behind for good; and Lydia, a woman whose marriage is falling apart because her body can't seem to stay pregnant; as they're called home to say goodbye to their mother and grandmother.
     
    This family's "reunion" unearths long-kept secrets and forces each member to ask themselves important questions about who is deserving of forgiveness and who bears the cross of blame.
     
    With stirring, evocative prose and a sense of place that is wholly immersive, offering a nuanced look into Black communities in Texas, and tackling themes like family, trauma, legacy, home, class, race and more, this beautiful yet heart-wrenching debut novel, will appeal to anyone who is interested in the intricacies of family and the ways bonds can be made, maintained or irrevocably broken.
    About the Author
    LaToya Watkins’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, The Sun, McSweeney's, Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. She has received grants, scholarships, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and A Public Space (she was one of their 2018 Emerging Writers Fellows). She holds a PhD in Aesthetic Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas and is co-director of the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. PERISH was her debut novel.
    About the Moderator
    Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, Kendra Allen is the author of The Collection Plate and When You Learn the Alphabet, an essay collection that won the 2019 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction; and she also writes music column Make Love in My Car for Southwest Review. Her memoir, Fruit Punch, will be out in August 2022. You can keep up with her work at KendraCanYou.Com. 
  • IRL STORYTIME: D is for Dance with Stacey Allen + Brynne Henry - August 2 @ 1 PM
    Sold out

    Celebrate D is for Dance: Dancing Through the Diaspora with Stacey Allen and Brynne Hentry! Come meet the author and illustrator, hear a beautiful story about dance and culture, and enjoy a dance demonstration by Nia's Daughters Movement Collective!

    EVENT DEETS

    When: Saturday, August 2 @ 1 PM

    Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St #2, Houston, TX 77004)

    How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you're coming or RSVP WITH BOOK to secure your copy of D is for Dance: Dancing Through the Diaspora.

    ABOUT THE BOOK

    Journey through the vibrant world of the African Diaspora with this captivating exploration of movement and culture. With each letter, uncover fascinating stories of legendary dancers, iconic styles, and the powerful cultural expressions that unite us all. Perfect for young readers, educators, and dance enthusiasts, this book is a joyful celebration of movement, history, and the enduring legacy of African diasporic traditions. Get ready to step, spin, and soar through the alphabet-one dance at a time!

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    Stacey Allen is an award-winning dancemaker, curator, and advocate for arts education, equity, and reproductive justice. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Nia’s Daughters Movement Collective, a professional dance company committed to creating and supporting art and wellness initiatives through the lens of Black women and girls. Stacey is the author of two children’s books, A Little Optimism Goes a Long Way—recipient of the 2024 Children’s Publication Award from the National Association of Multicultural Education—and D is for Dance: Dancing Through the Diaspora. She also created The Fairytale Project, a touring dance-theater production inspired by Texas Freedom Colonies.

    Stacey lives in the Greater Houston area with her husband, Chase Allen, and their three children: Chase Jr., Zora, and John. Learn more about her work at www.niasdaughters.com and follow her on Instagram at @theblackartsymom and @niasdaughters.

    ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

    Brynne Henry is a Houston-based illustrator, mixed-media artist, researcher, and K-12 instructor. She graduated from the University of North Texas with a B. F. A. in Art Education and has held multiple positions in research spanning across the African-American arts and humanities. Her interest in African-American humanities was sparked in her college art history classes and fueled by a research fellowship she received from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Her love for art was passed down generationally and she sincerely hopes to inspire the next generation of artists to continue using art as a vehicle for information exchange and self-expression. View more of her work at www.brynnehenry.com

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