The Gilda Stories

Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, now as a new Penguin Classics hardcover, a Penguin Speculative Fiction Special

A Penguin Classic Hardcover

First published in 1991, The Gilda Stories is a groundbreaking speculative fiction vampire novel that begins in 1850s Louisiana, where a young Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who “shares the blood” by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. Taking only blood as sustenance, killing as a last resort, Gilda moves through the centuries up to the dystopian future of 2050. Gomez’s classic, with a Black lesbian heroine, has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of Blackness, radical ecology, redefinitions of family, and the erotic potential of the vampire story.

Penguin Speculative Fiction Special is a hardcover series of horror, science fiction, fantasy, and more published by Penguin Classics. Featuring custom endpapers, specially commissioned cover art, and introductions by scholars and notable figures, these collectible editions celebrate classics that invite us to ask, “What if?” and that, through bold imagination, alternative visions, and magical realms, transform our perception of our world.Jewelle Gomez is a writer, an activist, and the author of many books, including Forty-Three Septembers, Don’t Explain, The Lipstick Papers, Flamingoes and Bears, and Oral Tradition. The Gilda Stories was the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards and was adapted for the stage by the Urban Bush Women theater company in thirteen U.S. cities.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs (afterword) is the author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, several works of poetry, and Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals, which won a Whiting Award for Nonfiction in 2022. In 2023, she won a Windham-Campbell Prize for her poetry.