This first volume in the Library of America edition of Octavia E. Butler's collected works opens with her masterpiece, Kindred, one of the landmark American novels of the last half century. Its heroine, Dana, a Black woman, is pulled back and forth between the present and the pre-Civil War past, where she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of a white ancestor whose life she must save to preserve her own. In Fledgling, an amnesiac discovers that she is a vampire, with a difference: she is a new, experimental birth with brown skin, giving her the fearful ability to go out in sunlight. Rounding out the volume are eight short stories and five essays--including two never before collected, plus a newly researched explanatory notes prepared by scholar Gerry Canavan. Butler's friend, the writer and editor Nisi Shawl, provides an introduction.