Books

First edition, first printing, inscribed by the author on the half title, "To Yvette, best wishes, Octavia E. Butler, 10-26-05". Though unmarked as such, the recipient was Yvette Le Roy, the founder of Liberty House in Harlem. Alongside promoting books by Black authors, her store sold handcrafts produced by the Mississippi Poor People's Corporation and hosted poetry readings by Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni. Fledgling was Butler's last lifetime publication, and her papers at the Huntington Library include multiple drafts for potential sequels. This copy has four flyers for the Langston Hughes Festival's "Tribute to Octavia Butler", 11 November 2005, which are loosely inserted. Butler, the first Black woman to receive both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and the first science fiction author to be granted a MacArthur fellowship, "creates powerful images of black women in a genre in which and from which they have traditionally been marginalized and excluded" (Boutler, p. 170). In this, a vampire science fiction novel, Butler transforms the traditionally white and paternalistic vampire myth into an interrogation of race, sexuality, and intimacy. Author Junot Díaz chose it as his 2005 Book of the Year in The Guardian, praising it as a "harrowing meditation on dominance, sex, addiction, miscegenation, and race that completely devours the genre which gave rise to it". Octavo. Original red boards, spine lettered in silver, dark red endpapers. With dust jacket. Foot of spine just bumped, trivial spots to top edge; unclipped jacket slightly creased at foot: a near-fine copy in like jacket. .

Fledgling, by Octavia E. Butler, presents a unique and gripping science fiction tale that explores themes of identity and survival through the story of an amnesiac girl with extraordinary abilities.