Philyaw's debut collection gathers nine stories about Black women negotiating desire, faith, family, and the expectations attached to churchgoing respectability. Across generations and settings, wives, daughters, mothers, and lovers pursue infidelity, casual sex, same-sex relationships, therapy, and self-definition while measuring themselves against teachings absorbed in AME, Baptist, Pentecostal, and other church traditions. Stories including "Eula," "Peach Cobbler," "How to Make Love to a Physicist," "Jael," and "Instructions for Married Christian Husbands" move between comedy, tenderness, and frank eroticism, refusing to divide women into saints and sinners. Published by a small university press after rejection elsewhere, the book became that press's most commercially successful title, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, and won the Story Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, and the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award.
Author: Deesha Philyaw · Original publisher: West Virginia University Press (Morgantown), 2020
