The acclaimed author of The Serpent’s Gift returns with this “deep and beautiful” (Jaqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author) story about a queer Black woman working to stay clean, pull her life together, and heal after being released from prison. Ranita Atwater is “getting short.” She is almost done with her four-year sentence for opiate possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center. Three years sober, she is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children. Ranita is regaining her freedom, but she’s leaving behind her lover Maxine, who has inspired her to imagine herself and the world differently. My name is Ranita, and I’m an addict, she has said again and again at recovery meetings. But who else is she? Who might she choose to become? Now she must steer clear of the temptations that have pulled her down, while atoning for her missteps and facing old wounds. With a fierce, smart, and sometimes funny voice, Ranita reveals how rocky and winding the path to wellness is for a Black woman, even as she draws on family, memory, faith, and love in order to choose life. Pomegranate is a complex portrayal of queer Black womanhood and marginalization in America from an author “working at the height of her powers” (Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling). In lyrical and precise prose, Helen Elaine Lee paints a humane and unflinching portrait of the devastating effects of incarceration and addiction, and of one woman’s determination to tell her story.

Nancy A. Collins (Swamp Thing, Sunglasses After Dark) has called upon some of today's finest creative talents — including Gail Simone, Steve Niles, Joe R. Lansdale, Devin Grayson, Stephen R. Bissette, and many more — to celebrate Vampirella's 45th Anniversary by crafting an anthology of twisted tales, bizarre bedtime stories, and fearsome fables in the tradition of the original Warren magazines, each featuring everyone's favorite sexy, kick-ass vampire-turned-monster hunter. And, boy, have they delivered! While exploring the Transylvanian castle she's recently inherited, Vampirella discovers a strange old book of "Feary Tales" that seems oddly familiar. Upon opening it, she is sucked inside its pages and lands in a weird alternate reality, where she is compelled by a disembodied voice calling itself 'The Storyteller' to live out each of the 'feary tales' if she ever hopes to return to reality. Collects the five-issue Vampirella: Feary Tales comic book series, with a complete cover gallery.

Honey West: equal part Marilyn Monroe and part Mike Hammer The first woman of private eye fiction, and the first woman character in the lead role of an action TV show, returns with all-new, swinging 60's sexy and thrilling mysteries by best-selling authors Trina Robbins and Elaine Lee

One of the most striking and heartening developments in American letters in recent years has been the flowering and attendant celebration of African-American writers and of books that have introduced to readers everywhere people, situations, and events that have, hitherto, largely been ignored, denied, or unknown. Now comes Helen Elaine Lee's supremely assured The Serpent's Gift, a first novel that gives to us -- with the fullest emotional resonance, humor, and exultation in the novelist's art -- the intertwined stories of two families from early in this century to our own times.

Central to this haunting (and sometimes haunted) novel are the mothers, a study in contrast in strength and rigidity, Ruby Staples and Eula Smalls, and their children: LaRue Smalls, adventurer, storyteller, and chronicler of his people; his sister Vesta, intimidated by life from an early age, yet determined, valiant even, to hold her disparate family together; and Ouida Staples, a rare beauty who elects, in the face of convention, to spend her life with another woman. Each will face trials and challenges and sometimes be transformed, shedding like the serpent, an old skin, reborn by the art of invention.

From its opening pages, which recount in eerily compelling detail, the death that will bring these people together, to its almost pastoral conclusion, The Serpent's Gift creates a world that is both realistic in its detail and lyrical in its presentation -- it is a superb, triumphant debut.