African-American Perspectives

A Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book A Walter Dean Myers Honor Book From the New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award finalist, a biography in verse and prose of science fiction visionary Octavia Butler, author of Parable of the Sower and Kindred. Acclaimed novelist Ibi Zoboi illuminates the young life of the visionary storyteller Octavia E. Butler in poems and prose. Born into the Space Race, the Red Scare, and the dawning Civil Rights Movement, Butler experiencedan American childhood that shaped her into the groundbreaking science-fiction storyteller whose novels continue to challenge and delight readers fifteen years after her death.

In this graphic novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower by Damian Duffy and John Jennings, the award-winning team behind the #1 New York Times bestseller Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, the author portrays a searing vision of America's future.   2021 Hugo Award Winner for Best Graphic Story or Comic   In the year 2024, the country is marred by unattended environmental and economic crises that lead to social chaos. Lauren Olamina, a preacher's daughter living in Los Angeles, is protected from danger by the walls of her gated community.   However, in a night of fire and death, what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: a startling vision of human destiny . . . and the birth of a new faith.   "The graphic novel is faithful to Butler, yet still fresh in its world building." --USA Today   "Alarmingly prescient and relevant . . . This accessible adaptation is poised to introduce Butler's dystopian tale to a new generation of readers." --Publishers Weekly

Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. ("You have to read them.") From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur "Genius" Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. "I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm." Dana's torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner's plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction's oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. "Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise" (New York Times). "Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it's absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream." --N. K. Jemisin This book has been published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the cover available.

A newly expanded edition of Octavia E. Butler's only collection of short stories. Butler graces new mansions of thought with her eloquent, distinguished and poignant prose. Although this book is little in size, its ideas are splendidly large.' - Booklist 'The title story is justly famous. Splendid pieces, set forth in calm, lucid prose with never a word wasted.' - Kirkus Reviews This New York Times notable Book includes the Hugo and the Nebula awards winner Bloodchild and the Hugo Award winner Speech Shounds.'