Black Star Line

Black Star Line is a genre-defying story collection in the vein of Octavia Butler and Jordan Peele that fuses speculative fiction, Sci-Fi, and magical realism to explore Black life at the edge of collapse and possibility.

Spanning virtual worlds, haunted cities, and dystopian futures, the stories in this collection follow characters facing impossible conditions in their relentless pursuit of freedom and pleasure.

In “Drapetomania,” a mysterious epidemic causes Black people to run uncontrollably until their bodies give out, transforming a racist 19th-century pseudoscientific diagnosis into a chilling meditation on escape, exhaustion, and collective grief; in “Return Doors,” a couple’s unraveling coincides with the appearance of portals visible only to Black people; in “The Armillary Sphere,” a boy travels to Seoul to undergo a procedure that allows him to glimpse the future and relive the past; in “Lifeblood,” a woman seeks gender euphoria in a virtual reality under the watchful eye of a sinister corporation.

Electrifying and radically inventive, Black Star Line channels both blistering rage and profound tenderness, mapping the fragile, queer, ecstatic, and often perilous possibilities that emerge when we dare to imagine beyond the constraints of the present.

William Lohier is a Haitian and Korean American writer from Brooklyn, New York. He is an English PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his master’s degree from Oxford and bachelor’s degree from Harvard. His fiction has appeared in One Story and his story “Drapetomania” was selected by Celeste Ng for The Best American Short Stories 2025.

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
  
• Publish Date: March 23, 2027
  
• Pages: 240
  
• Language: English
  
• Type: Hardcover
  
• EAN/UPC: 9781668219546
  
• Dimensions: 8.4 in H | 5.5 in W | 0.6 in T | 0.8 lb Wt