Editor's note: This giveaway is now closed.
Octavia E. Butler's bestselling 1979 novel Kindred follows a contemporary Black woman, Dana, who is transported back in time to a pre-Civil War plantation. A harrowing exploration of inherited trauma, racism in modern America, and the sacrifices Dana's enslaved ancestors had to make to survive, Kindred is a book that's impossible to forget.
In September 2022, Beacon Press will release a new edition of Kindred, featuring art work by Sean Qualls and a cover design by Carol Chu. And we're giving away 10 copies! Enter your email address below to take home the new 'gift edition' of Butler's Kindred.
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About the prizes:
Kindred
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.
Soon to be an FX Networks TV series adaptation with a pilot directed by Janicza Bravo (Zola), written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), and executive produced by Jacobs-Jenkins and Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain).
“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).
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Note: The sweepstakes is open to all legal residents of the 50 United States and Washington, DC who are 18 years of age and older by August 8, 2022.
