Tomi Adeyemi

Octavia Butler

Kindred

The definitive edition of the complete works of the "grand dame" of American science fiction begins with this volume gathering two novels and the complete stories Library of America extends its celebration of the best, most groundbreaking works of science fiction with a definitive new edition of the complete works of Octavia Butler. Eerily perceptive and still remarkably fresh, Butler's distinctive approach to the genre has been extraordinarily influential, inspiring current practicioners like N. K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor. This first volume opens with Butler's best-known novel, the harrowing and incisive Kindred, joined by the vampire novel Fledgling as well as her complete short stories. In Kindred, a black woman married to a white man is pulled back and forth between her twentieth century present and a pre-Civil War past in which she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of her white ancestor, with repercussions both for her view of herself and her relationship with her husband. This landmark novel forever changed the way we think about what science fiction can do. In Fledgling, a woman wakes up, covered in burns, in a mountainside cave with no knowledge of who she is or what happened to her. She discovers that she is a vampire, and that there are others like her--but among the long-lived Ina, who live in symbiosis with their human blood sources, she is something new: an experimental birth, containing African American human DNA that gives her dark skin, and therefore the feared and fearful ability to go out in sunlight. Ancient racial prejudice breaks out among the vampires as she seeks justice. Also included are all nine of Butler's published short stories, together in one volume for the first time, plus two essays from the Butler archive, a newly-researched chronology of her life and career, and helpful explanatory notes.

Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories (LOA #338)

Amanecer

A beautiful boxed set brings together the great sci-fi writer's two award-winning Parable books The perfect gift for fans of Octavia Butler, this boxed set pairs the bestselling Nebula-prize nominee, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, which together tell the near-future odyssey of Lauren Olamina, a "hyperempathic" black woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized. In Sower, the place is California, where small walled communities protect from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicts. Lauren sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown. The book has an introduction by feminist, journalist, activist, and author Gloria Steinem. Parable of the Talents celebrates the classic Butlerian themes of alienation and transcendence, violence and spirituality, slavery and freedom, separation and community, to astonishing effect, in the shockingly familiar, broken world of 2032. It is told in the voice of Lauren Olamina's daughter--from whom she has been separated for most of the girl's life--with sections in the form of Lauren's journal. Against a background of a war-torn continent, and with a far-right religious crusader in the office of the U.S. presidency, this is a book about a society whose very fabric has been torn asunder, and where the basic physical and emotional needs of people seem almost impossible to meet. Talents is introduced by singer, musician, composer, producer, and curator Toshi Reagon, who created an opera based on the Parable books.

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents Boxed Set

The New York Times best-selling author’s time-travel classic that makes us feel the horrors of American slavery and indicts our country’s lack of progress on racial reconciliation The series adaption from FX premieres December 13 on Hulu. Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans, The Patient), and Darren Aronofsky (The Whale). Janicza Bravo (Zola) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, and Gayle Rankin. “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).

Kindred, Gift Edition

Dawn Xenogenesis

This 25th anniversary edition, about a modern black woman who is snatched away to the antebellum South, celebrates a classic work with "much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now" ("Los Angeles Herald Examiner").

Octavia Butler

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