Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories

Edited by Nisi Shawl and Gerry Canavan

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Video Adapting Kindred for Television: Highlights from Our Interview with Screenwriter Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Video Filming Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Video Octavia E. Butler: “I could become a writer, or I could die really young”

An original and eerily prophetic writer, Octavia E. Butler used the conventions of science fiction to explore the dangerous legacy of racism in America in harrowingly personal terms. She broke new ground with books that featured complex Black female protagonists—“I wrote myself in,” she would later recall—establishing herself as one of the pioneers of the Afrofuturist aesthetic. In 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, in recognition of her achievement in creating new aspirations for the genre and for American literature. This first volume in the Library of America edition of Butler’s collected works gathers her 1979 masterpiece, Kindred, one of the landmark American novels of the last half century; her final novel, Fledgling; and her collected short stories.

In Kindred, Dana, a Black woman whose husband is white, is pulled back and forth between the California present and the pre–Civil War South, where she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of a white ancestor whose life she must save in order to preserve her own. Gripping and suspenseful, the novel uses the conceit of time travel to plumb the mutilating structures of slavery and the terrible cost they continue to exact.

A woman wakes up covered in burns in a mountainside cave with no knowledge of who she is or what has happened to her. In time she discovers that she is a vampire, and that there are others like her. Among the long-lived Ina, though, Shori is something new: an experimental birth, containing African American human DNA that gives her brown skin and the feared and fearful ability to go out in sunlight. Part murder mystery, part fantasy thriller, Fledgling is Butler’s incomparable take on the vampire novel.

This Library of America volume also includes eight short stories and five essays—including two previously uncollected—as well as a newly researched chronology of Butler’s life and career and helpful explanatory notes by scholar Gerry Canavan. Butler’s friend, the writer and editor Nisi Shawl, provides an introduction.

Gerry Canavan is an associate professor in the English Department at Marquette University, specializing in 20th- and 21st-century literature. An editor at Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television, he has also coedited Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014), The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015), and The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019). His first monograph, Octavia E. Butler, appeared in 2016 in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series at University of Illinois Press.

Nisi Shawl is a founder of the diversity-in-speculative-fiction nonprofit the Carl Brandon Society and serves on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop. Author of the story collection Filter House, winner of the 2009 Tiptree/Otherwise Award, and the novel Everfair, a 2016 Nebula finalist, Shawl edited Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars (2013) and coedited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (2013).

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Video Adapting Kindred for Television: Highlights from Our Interview with Screenwriter Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Video Filming Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Video Octavia E. Butler: “I could become a writer, or I could die really young”

A TV talk show segment from 2000 is an engaging way to learn m...

Interviews The worlds of Octavia E. Butler: “There’s real danger in these stories”

Story of the Week Octavia E. Butler, “Positive Obsession”

Influences Sarah Pinsker: Octavia Butler, Woody Guthrie, and other classics that inspired my debut
Table of Contents

Introduction by Nisi Shawl

KINDRED

FLEDGLING

COLLECTED STORIES
Childfinder
Crossover
Near of Kin
Speech Sounds
Bloodchild
The Evening and the Morning and the Night
Amnesty
The Book of Martha

ESSAYS
Lost Races of Science Fiction
Positive Obsession
Furor Scribendi
The Monophobic Response
Preface to Bloodchild and Other Stories

add to cart

30.00 List Price: $35.00 (Save: 14%) Free shipping

Or buy from our partners

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #203549

ISBN: 978-1-59853-675-1 789 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 338 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore LOA N°335

The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women

Ann Petry: The Street, The Narrows LOA N°314

Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s LOA N°336

Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories LOA N°74

Library of America

Curator

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

Publisher

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

Non-Profit

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission