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Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
Danielle Evans
Riverhead Hardcover
October 2010
On Sale: September 23, 2010
240 pages ISBN: 1594487693 EAN: 9781594487699 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Introducing a new star of her generation, an electric debut
story collection about young African-American and mixed-race
teens, 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
bold new voice. 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 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.
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