heads of the colored people by nafissa thompson spires

The next story, “The Body’s Defenses Against Itself,” follows these girls, Christinia and Fatima, through high school and into adulthood as they continue to needle each other over issues of appearance and weight. All these traits are evident in an epistolary narrative entitled “Belles Lettres,” which tells its story through a series of increasingly snarky notes exchanged between two African-American mothers via the backpacks of their young daughters, the only two black students in their class at a California private school, who are engaged in some stressful and, at times, physical conflict with each other. In her debut story collection, Thompson-Spires flashes fearsome gifts for quirky characterization, irony-laden repartee, and edgy humor. Boldly resisting categorization and easy answers, Nafissa Thompson-Spires 'has taken the best of what Toni Cade Bambara, Morgan Parker, and Junot Díaz do plus a whole lot of something we've never seen in American literature, blended it all together.giving us one of the finest short-story collections' (Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division).A bold new voice, at once insolently sardonic and incisively compassionate, asserts itself amid a surging wave of young African-American fiction writers. Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. In the title story, when a cosplayer, dressed as his favorite anime character, is mistaken for a violent threat the consequences are dire in another story, a teen struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with so-called black culture. Some are darkly humorous-two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids' backpacks-while others are devastatingly poignant.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with race, identity politics, and the contemporary middle class in this 'vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive' (George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo) collection.Įach captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of utterly original characters. In one of the season's most acclaimed works of fiction-longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the PEN Open Book Award-Nafissa Thompson-Spires offers 'a firecracker of a book.a triumph of storytelling: intelligent, acerbic, and ingenious' ( Financial Times).

Included in Best Books of 2018 Lists from Refinery29, NPR, The Root, HuffPost, Vanity Fair, Bustle, Chicago Tribune, PopSugar, and The Undefeated. * Finalist for the Kirkus Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize* *Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize*

Heads of the colored people by nafissa thompson spires