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Octavia E. Butler

Audiobook
Nonfiction: Biography
Unabridged   8 hour(s)
Publication date: 03/11/2025

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Octavia E. Butler

H is for Horse

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Digital Download ISBN:9781696617505

Summary

An homage to the childhood genius of Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler.

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Product Description

An homage to the childhood genius of Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler.

The figure of the horse, at once earthly and transcendent, represented the contradictions of freedom and captivity that enabled young Octavia to develop her nuanced sense of voice and place. Drawing on previously unknown archival research, this volume illustrates how Butler's development as a writer was tied to her extraordinary resourcefulness and self-awareness growing up as an awkward, bookish Black girl in segregated, Cold War Pasadena. She persistently re-visited and revised her early writings on teenage angst, Martians, Westerns, and racial politics. In one way or another her supernatural characters defied the constraints of gender, race, and class with equine-inflected resilience.

In the spirit of Butler's passion for library research, this book is comprised of twenty-six short A-Z chapters. It is part childhood biography, art and literary analysis, and memoir. It interweaves the author's personal recollections with scholarly musings on poetry, film, and literature inspired by Butler's encyclopedic reading habits and experiments with genre. Just as cross-species kinships are at the heart of her Afro-futurist, eco-feminist storytelling, Butler demonstrates that coming-of-age is an ongoing process and key to healing our damaged planet.

Author Bio

Chi-ming Yang is a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in histories of race, empire, and East-West cultural exchanges. She is also the author of Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England.