A linked collection of stories about the contemporary Black middle class — its strivers, parents, professors, and performers — watched with a satirist's eye and a clinician's patience. In the title story, a Black cosplayer dressed as his favorite anime character walks into the kind of police encounter the reader sees coming pages before he does; elsewhere, two mothers wage a long war through notes left in their children's backpacks, and characters recur across stories at different ages, so the collection accumulates into a portrait of a community. Thompson-Spires's debut won the PEN Open Book Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award.
Author: Nafissa Thompson-Spires · Original publisher: 37 Ink / Atria (New York), 2018
