Description

Introducing a new star of her generation, an electric debut story collection about mixed-race and African-American teenagers, women, and men struggling to find a place in their families and communities. When Danielle Evans s short story Virgins was published in The Paris Review in late 2007, it announced the arrival of a major new American short story writer. Written when she was only twenty-three, Evans s story of two black, blue-collar fifteen-year-old girls flirtation with adulthood for one night was startling in its pitch-perfect examination of race, class, and the shifting terrain of adolescence. Now this debut short story collection delivers on the promise of that early story. In Harvest, a college student s unplanned pregnancy forces her to confront her own feelings of inadequacy in comparison to her white classmates. In Jellyfish, a father s misguided attempt to rescue a gift for his grown daughter from an apartment collapse magnifies all he doesn t know about her. And in Snakes, the mixed-race daughter of intellectuals recounts the disastrous summer she spent with her white grandmother and cousin, a summer that has unforeseen repercussions in the present. Striking in their emotional immediacy, the stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self are based in a world where inequality is reality but where the insecurities of adolescence and young adulthood, and the tensions within family and the community, are sometimes the biggest complicating forces in one s sense of identity and the choices one makes.