Neighbors and Other Stories
-
-
4.3 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
A bold and haunting debut story collection that follows various characters as they navigate the day-to-day perils of Jim Crow racism from Diane Oliver, a missing figure in the canon of twentieth-century African American literature, with an introduction by Tayari Jones
A remarkable talent far ahead of her time, Diane Oliver died in 1966 at the age of 22, leaving behind these crisply told and often chilling tales that explore race and racism in 1950s and 60s America. In this first and only collection by a masterful storyteller finally taking her rightful place in the canon, Oliver’s insightful stories reverberate into the present day.
There’s the nightmarish “The Closet on the Top Floor” in which Winifred, the first Black student at her newly integrated college, starts to physically disappear; “Mint Juleps not Served Here” where a couple living deep in a forest with their son go to bloody lengths to protect him; “Spiders Cry without Tears,” in which a couple, Meg and Walt, are confronted by prejudices and strains of interracial and extramarital love; and the high tension titular story that follows a nervous older sister the night before her little brother is set to desegregate his school.
These are incisive and intimate portraits of African American families in everyday moments of anxiety and crisis that look at how they use agency to navigate their predicaments. As much a social and historical document as it is a taut, engrossing collection, Neighbors is an exceptional literary feat from a crucial once-lost figure of letters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This extraordinary posthumous debut collection from Oliver (1943–1966) astutely portrays the realities of African American life in the South during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras. The author was born in North Carolina and enrolled in the University of Iowa's MFA program, and though she was only 22 when she died in a motorcycle accident, she managed to publish four of these 14 stories in her lifetime. The title entry offers a complex view of a family on the eve of a boy's first day as the only Black student at his newly integrated elementary school, as an onslaught of threatening letters gradually erodes his parents' resolve to send him. In "The Closet on the Top Floor," Oliver adds a surreal element to the theme of desegregation, as a Black college student whose parents advocated for her school to integrate begins to withdraw from her classmates and eventually spends much of her time in a closet. "Health Service," "Traffic Jam," and "Spiders Without Tears" delve into familial ties, romance, and interracial relationships, respectively. The author's heartfelt and resplendent writing is loaded with an earthy complexity reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston—indeed, novelist Tayari Jones names Oliver along with Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ann Petry as "literary foremothers" in her introduction. Oliver's brilliant stories belong in the American canon.
