Company
Stories
-
-
4.0 • 1개의 평가
-
-
- US$9.99
출판사 설명
WINNER OF THE 2023 LOS ANGELES TIMES ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 WILLIAM SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITING
A richly detailed, brilliantly woven debut collection about the lives and lore of one Black family, named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2023
Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, Company tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.
Each piece includes a moment when a guest arrives at someone’s home. In “The Good, Good Men,” two brothers reunite to oust a “deadbeat” boyfriend from their mother’s house. In “The Everest Society,” the brothers’ sister anxiously prepares for a home visit from a social worker before adopting a child. In “Birds of Paradise,” their aunt, newly promoted to university provost, navigates a minefield of microaggressions at her own welcome party. And in the haunting title story, the provost’s sister finds her solitary life disrupted when her late sister’s daughter comes calling.
These are stories about intimacy, societal and familial obligations, and the ways inheritances shape our fates. Buoyant, somber, sharp, and affectionate, this collection announces a remarkable new voice in fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sanders excels in this masterly debut collection about a Black extended family and their triumphs, problems, and secrets. In "The Good, Good Men," brothers Miles and Theo MacHale meet in Washington, D.C., on a mission to drive away their mother Lela's latest freeloading boyfriend. Elsewhere and often, Sanders retells an event from one story in another, filling in blind spots and offering different versions. "Bird of Paradise" and "La Belle Hottentote" each delve into Lela's oldest sister Cassandra's complex relationships with Lela's twin daughters, Mariolive and Caprice, each of whom she's looked out for since they were born, Lela's jazz-musician husband having left her when she was pregnant with them. In the first entry, Cassandra celebrates her appointment as a D.C.–area college provost at a party, where she shrugs off passive-aggressive comments from the older white men who backed her competitor. The second tells the story from the twins' points of view along with that of two of Cassandra's other nieces, all of whom attend the party as Cassandra's guests. There, one of the cousins hooks up with the son of Cassandra's boss and the others debate family lore about how their grandmother raised the money to open an Atlantic City jazz club back in the 1970s. Sanders takes pleasure in roasting her characters, such as by having finance bro Theo speak like a character on Succession: "I need to maximize face time... to kick off some new stuff I'm doing in the coding space." She also exhibits great care and love for them, describing their slights, heartaches, and misbehavior with exquisite emotional acuity. This is a winner. Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the last name of the characters Miles and Theo MacHale and misidentified the location of another character's college.
