Brinkley's debut collection gathers nine stories about Black men and boys in New York — the Bronx, Brooklyn and beyond — across roughly three decades. A Bronx boy on a day-camp trip to a suburban backyard pool encounters power and privilege he can barely name. In "J'ouvert, 1996," a teenager intent on proving himself during the all-night carnival revel watches over his younger brother. Two Columbia students follow women home from a Brooklyn party and must face the truth of their own desires; an ex-convict reconnects with a dead friend's girlfriend; at a capoeira conference, two brothers wrestle with how to tell their family's fractured history. Fathers and sons, brothers and friends recur throughout, men whose mistakes damage the people closest to them and who reach, unevenly, for tenderness and repair in a world shaped by race, class and inherited ideas of manhood.
Author: Jamel Brinkley · Original publisher: Graywolf Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2018
