Short story collections get a bad rap. Notoriously bad sellers, even critically acclaimed collections often sit on book stores’ shelves gathering dust. My heart always does a small, happy leap when I see a collection break this curse, because the publishing world would be a sad place without them—I’m a firm believer that the aha moment in perfectly executed short story can blow a reader’s hair back with more gusto than the most epic of literary novels, its quiet efficiency and precision making the emotional payoff all the more remarkable.And how perfectly executed are the eight tales in Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead, $25.95). A graduate from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Evans has already garnered some serious review attention (the book was featured in New York Magazine's Fall preview with the claim that it “threatens to become the season’s hot young MFA discovery”). Even before this debut her remarkable talent earned notable accolades for so young a writer—her fiction debuted in The Paris Review when she was only twenty-three and another story in the collection appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2008.
Evans more than lives up to these honors. Her prose is elegant but straightforward and fluid and the points she makes are wise and profound but derived from believably ordinary events. Ostensibly things haven’t changed much during many of these stories’ climaxes, but we can feel the difference in the aftermath as readily as if a tornado had just blown through. Every sigh, every silence, every eye role or snarky comment speaks volumes. Each of the stories has a black or biracial protagonist, and while the non white experience in America is certainly explored here with wit and candor, factors universal to every person’s growing up and finding his or her way in the world prove equally relevant to the stories’ outcomes. There’s as much to learn and experience here as there is to relate to.
Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Riverhead
