We talk with Lynnicia Massenburg, Dr. Kristen Lillvis, and Dr. Kendra R. Parker about Octavia E. Butler's dystopian novel Parable of the Sower. This is in advance of a book discussion on the novel hosted by Schlow Library  in collaboration with the Black Graduate Student Association at Penn State.  Come join us!

If you'd like to read Parable of the Sower, we have it in print, ebook, audiobook, and comic form.

Also in this episode,  our Underwriters from Fiction comes from Pawnee, Indiana's largest Internet Service Provider, and our prose nightcap is a selection from Nancy McCabe's memoir Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Further reading & listening 

• Lavender III, I. (2019). Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement. United States: Ohio State University Press.
• Womack, Y. (2013). Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture. United States: Chicago Review Press.
• Eshun, K. (2003). Further Considerations on Afrofuturism. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(2), 287-302. Retrieved February 2, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949397
• The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler. (2020). United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Parker, K. R. (2018). Black Female Vampires in African American Women’s Novels, 1977–2011: She Bites Back. United States: Lexington Books.
• Lillvis, K. (2017). Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination. Greece: University of Georgia Press.
• Rhee, M. (2017). Love, Robot. United States: Operating System.
• Shaw, K. (2019). Too Numerous. United States: University of Massachusetts Press.
• Bertram, L. (2019). Travesty Generator. United States: Noemi Press.
• Adrienne Maree Brown & Toshi Reagon (2019-2020). Octavia's Parables. Retrieved February 2, 2021
• Shankar Vedantam, et al. (2019). Where does religion come from? One researcher points to 'cultural' evolution. Hidden Brain. Retrieved February 2, 2021

Additional info on BGSA's Black Business Week coming up in Feb. 2021.