Heads of the Colored People
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A satirical and daring collection of short stories exploring black life from one of America's rising stars.
'Makes you shake your head in delight... Her stories feel simultaneously like the poke of a stick and a comforting balm; a smack followed by a kiss. I’m so into it' Bim Adewunmi, Guardian
Heads of the Colored People interrogates our supposedly post-racial era to wicked and devastating effect, exposing the violence that threatens black Americans, no matter their apparent success.
A teenager is insidiously bullied as her YouTube following soars; an assistant professor finds himself losing a subtle war against his office mate; a nurse is worn down by the demand for her skills as a funeral singer. And across a series of stories, a young woman grows up, negotiating and renegotiating her identity.
This electric collection of short stories marks the arrival of a remarkable writer and an urgent new voice.
*Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction 2019*
*Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2019*
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Thompson-Spires's debut collection, she turns her keen eye onto members of the black community that don't often receive center stage a maker of YouTube videos that induce the tingly autonomous sensory meridian response in viewers ("Whisper to a Scream"), fruitarians ("The Subject of Consumption"), and the differently abled and the women who love them perhaps a little too much ("This Todd"). Thompson-Spires eschews the easy or sentimental, and there is a satirist in her that lends the stories a dark, funny edge; for example, Fatima learns how to be black from an albino girl named Violet. The confidence she gains from their lessons lands Fatima her first (white) boyfriend, to whom she betrays Violet's insecurities about her albinism. In the title story, an anime cosplayer named Riley brawls with self-published comics artist Brother Man outside the Los Angeles Convention Center the police, of course, misconstrue this, and an artist takes the opportunity to use the altercation and its aftermath in a personal project. This is also the most metafictional of the stories, with an omniscient "I" stepping away at the end to acknowledge the narrative clumsiness of the story before the reader can. Though the characters sometimes feel one-note, Thompson-Spires proves herself a trenchant humorist with an eye for social nuance.
