Search results

Happy Birthday to Octavia Butler, our favorite Gemini-Cancer cusp speculative fiction genius! For 24 hours only, we're offering 40% off both Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents exclusively on our site.

It's the book that predicted Trump, altered the course of speculative fiction, and helped to inspire Beyoncé's Lemonade. It's also a masterpiece in its own right. I'm talking about Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which was published twenty-five years ago this week. To commemorate the date, you can read the first three chapters of the book here. And if you don't want to give your money to Amazon, you can buy the book direct from Seven Stories, at 25% off, with free shipping within the U.S. Enjoy!

In this excerpt from The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War, and Our Call to Greatness, new in paperback this autumn, Betsy Hartmann discusses what has come to be called "the greening of hate"—that is, the fusion of environmentalism with anti-immigrant bigotry, an ideology which was shared by both the Christchurch and El Paso gunmen. She also touches on modern eugenics in the U.S., and stresses the need to avoid simple dualities in discussing questions of population and environment. 

The ebook edition of Kate Braverman's masterful first novel, Lithium for Medea, is now free through April 5, 6PM EST. Braverman, whose latest book, A Good Day for Seppuku, was touted in the New Yorker last month, is a literary virtuoso, and it's with Lithium for Medea that her novselistic virtuosity first showed through. Lithium is a tale of addiction: to drugs, physical love, and dysfunctional family chains. It is also a tale of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry. But in the end, this great novel is so much more than the words that can be used to describe it. An unsung masterpiece, Lithium is a lyrical fireball that sears the reader from its first line. It is a book that, like all great books, created its own tradition. And the time is now to follow in its burning wake.

To usher in back-to-school season, we've put up a free e-book of Robert Graves's witty, unorthodox writing handbook, The Reader Over Your Shoulder. The promotion lasts through September 11, 5PM EST.

Here on the blog, you can find an excerpt from the first chapter, "The Peculiar Qualities of English." Scholarly and thorough, but never pedantic or doctrinaire, the piece demonstrates why grammar maven Patricia T. O'Conner calls The Reader Over Your Shoulder "the best book on writing ever published."

Give the gift of leftist literature with up to 85% off all backlist books

This is the real gift of her work, a gift that shines in Bloodchild: in inviting her readers to engage with darker realities, to immerse themselves in worlds more disturbing and complex than our own, she asks readers to acknowledge the costs of our collective inaction, our collective bowing to depravity, to tribalism, to easy ignorance and violence. Her primary characters refuse all of that. Her primary characters refuse to deny the better aspects of their humanity. They insist on embracing tenderness and empathy, and in doing so, they invite readers to realize that we might do so as well. Butler makes hope possible.