A Personal Anthology Summer Reading Special 2020
A Personal Anthology began as a weekly mailout in September 2017 and has since then has gone through 121 editions. Most Anthologies are solo productions, selected by a single guest editor, and occasionally I organise a collaborative letter, for example when the project goes on hold for the holidays, at Christmas, and for two months over the summer.
As in previous years, I’m leaving you with a Summer Reading Special, but this time I’ve decided not to crowdsource a holiday-themed letter. Instead, and as (probably like plenty of people like me) I've been reviewing my book-buying and -reading in the light of Black Lives Matter and the call for more diversity in publishing, I've decided to pick a dozen stories by contemporary Black writers from the archives. Some of these writers I was introduced to by the project; some of their books I’ve bought as a result; all the stories are great, and happily most of them are available to read online.
As well as enjoying the introductions to these dozen stories, you might want to read the recent report Re:Thinking ‘Diversity’ in Publishing, written by Dr Anamik Saha and Dr Sandra van Lente, and published by Goldsmiths Press in partnership with Spread the Word and The Bookseller. You can download it here. As a university lecturer, I will be reading it closely.
A Personal Anthology will return in September. If you would like to contribute your own selection, please do get in touch. And if you are a Black or other BAME writer, critic or general well-read reader, I’d be particularly keen to hear from you.
Until then, happy reading, and thanks to all the contributors!
Jonathan
‘Who Will Greet You at Home’ by Lesley Nneka Arimah, introduced by Sharanya
Ever since I first read—and loved—this story, I have googled it at random moments just so I can be struck by the first line:
The yarn baby lasted a good month, emitting dry, cotton-soft gurgles and pooping little balls of lint, before Ogechi snagged its thigh on a nail and it unravelled as she continued walking, mistaking its little huffs for the beginnings of hunger, not the cries of an infant being undone. What an opening, and what a world.
Nneka Arimah’s assurance with fantasy is frankly just delightful to witness, and part of that delight is at the sheer grace and ambition of the story in its centering of radical reproductive futures, storytelling-as-prophecy, and hair. Hair! I continue to marvel at the compactness and elegance of the story.
First published in The New Yorker, October 26, 2015. Collected in What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, Tinder Press, 2017. Read it online here.
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‘Shirley from a Small Place’ by Alexia Arthurs, introduced by Sharlene Teo
Arthurs writes in a beautifully unpretentious manner that weaves in shrewd social observations with great emotional acuity. The Shirley in this story is obviously based on Rihanna, and I love the chutzpah and sheer sense of fun in that! From the obvious Rihanna references (who doesn’t love Rihanna?) to its incredibly “literary” title, this story is both a hoot and technically impressive. With such a premise it might easily have veered toward yet another commentary about celebrity culture that perpetuates the vapidity, excess and so-whatness it critiques – but what you get instead is a moving study of the complex, tensile currents of feeling between mothers and daughters.
First published in Granta 143, July 2019 and available online here. Collected in How to Love a Jamaican, Picador, 2018.
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‘Hitting Budapest’ by NoViolet Bulawayo, introduced by Sarah Ladipo Manyika
Just read the first line of this story out loud and listen for the jazz in the variety of names that Bulawayo uses: “We are on our way to Budapest: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me.” Darling, the child protagonist of this story, and her aforementioned friends are struggling to survive in a desolate land. Innovative in its language and tone— the characters of this Caine Prize-winning story leap from the page in prose that walks a tightrope between comedy and tragedy. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing the author read from this story on several occasions, perhaps most memorably at a sold-out reading in San Francisco where Bulawayo and I began our conversation about this story (which would ultimately become the first chapter in the novel We Need New Names) with music and dancing.
First published in The Boston Review, November 2010 and incorporated into We Need New Names, Chatto & Windus, 2013. Read it online here
Read Sarah’s full Personal Anthology here.
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‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid, introduced by Leone Ross
When I was growing up, I found a lot of Caribbean literature [shhh, whisper it] unbearably worthy. Perhaps it was what they gave us to read at school, perhaps I had swallowed a colonialist aesthetic [ahem, Stephen King], but there was something so obedient about these literatures of my youth, before I had the capacity to realise, for example, what Naipaul or Sam Selvon were trying to do. Our nonfiction, speeches, essays, our political rhetoric from Garvey to Fidel was so subversive and often so beautiful, our poets from Mutabaruka to Louise Bennett so playful and irreverent. Was reggae our only recourse for story? It was really only when the deliciously vulgar and mischievous Anthony C. Winkler blew Kingston apart with his 1987 novel The Lunatic that I stopped being so annoyed by the literary conservatism. All along, it was Antiguan writer Jamaican Kincaid’s short stories that sustained me. She never explained her femaleness, her heritage, her blackness. She was just that, and you accepted it, and she assumed your ass would get her, and if you didn’t, she seemed unbothered. She was a modernist, a sometimes-magic realist, and she seemed fearless to me. ‘Girl’ is one of her better-known and most beloved short works, taking the form of a list of declarative statements or commands, made by an unknown mother figure to who we presume is a daughter. In one long, unfurling, brilliantly detailed sentence, we see the entirety of domestic and social expectation on a young black girl’s head. I realise, curating this anthology, how important sound is to me, just as in Jean Toomer’s work, so in Kincaid. “Are you really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?” Kincaid asks, a po-face, bad-gyal call-to-arms. I wanted to be exactly that kind of woman.
First published in The New Yorker, June 26, 1978. Collected in At The Bottom Of The River, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983. Read it online here
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‘Reversible’ by Courttia Newland, introduced by Simon Okotie
There was a time before black British fiction, and that time was not that long ago. I am exaggerating for effect, but not by much. Courttia Newland was one of few shining early lights in that wilderness, with his wonderful novel from ’97, The Scholar. This story is like a scene from Top Boy yet all the more poignant for its temporal reversal.
First published in Sex & Death, Faber & Faber, edited by Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs; collected in Best British Short Stories 2017, Salt Publishing
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‘Walk with Sleep’ by Irenosen Okojie, introduced by Kit Caless
Irenosen Okojie’s 2016 collection Speak Gigantular will be rated a 21st century modern classic in years to come, I’m certain of it. The imagination, wit, energy and bravura in that book is unparalleled and I’ve loved reading and re-reading it over the last couple of years. The literary punch in stories like ‘Gunk’, the pathos in ‘Why is Pepe Canary Yellow?’ and the oddness of ‘Jody’ make her book an unequivocal joy. My favourite story in the book is ‘Walk with Sleep’, a strange tale of limbo in the London Underground. It is told with real elegance and poise. The central conceit is haunting – that those who commit suicide on the Underground meet each other as ghosts, trying to find their way back to the world, and many times I’m waiting for a train at a Tube station I think about it and imagine Okojie’s characters playing in the tunnels.
From Speak Gigantular, Jacaranda Books 2016
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‘My Daughter the Racist’ by Helen Oyeyemi, introduced by May-Lan Tan
“The soldiers remind me of the boys from here sometimes. The way our boys used to be.”
From Mr Fox. London: Picador, 2011. Read online
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‘The Ant of the Self’ by ZZ Packer, introduced by Linda Mannheim
All the stories in ZZ Packer’s debut collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, are mesmerising. In this one, a teenage boy is dragged along to the Million Man March — 1995’s gathering of African-American men in Washington, D.C. – by his self-absorbed and reckless father. Along the way, they stop in Indiana to pick up some macaw parrots, which the father plans to sell during the march. The father’s sometimes girlfriend, Lupita, has looked after (and grown fond of) the birds. “You are never thinking about what Lupita feels!” the girlfriend shouts, as they take the macaws. The boy thinks she’s going to come after him and his father when they take the birds, “but all she does is plop down on her porch step, holding her head in her hands.” And so the men continue on to DC, with the macaws echoing phrases they have learnt. When the boy is let down by his father again and sits alone in a DC train station, he watches another father and his son who have come to the march: a man who treats his toddler son with playful tenderness.
From Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead Books), originally appeared in The New Yorker, November 25, 2002 and available online here
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‘Drag’ by Leone Ross, introduced by Kathy Hoyle
When I was struggling to write sex scenes for my novel, I put a call out on Twitter for help. A huge collective of voices pointed me toward Leone Ross and her sultry seductive writing. I read her collection Come Let Us Sing Anyway and found it utterly bewitching. ‘Drag’ stood out for me with its lyrical, erotic prose and its feisty protagonist, Josephine, who strives to find her own identity through a series of sexual encounters. She is first a drag queen, relinquishing her femininity, then an executive, surrendering her power and finally a bride-to-be, who realises that SHE is all she needs. Rich in sensuous detail and utterly seductive prose, this story is a masterclass in erotic writing.
First published in Brown Sugar: A Collection of Erotic Black Fiction, ed. Carol Taylor, Dutton Plume, 2001. Collected in Come Let Us Sing Anyway, Peepal Tree Press, 2017. An excerpt of the story was printed in Cosmopolitan magazine, September 2018, and can be read here
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‘Driver’ by Taiye Selasi, introduced by Zoe Gilbert
Rhythm is the beating heart of this story, and were the audio version of Selasi reading it herself still available, that is where I would send you. Every line is structured to produce a rhythm that starts to affect your heartbeat and your own speech after a while, but that seductive beat reaches new heights of incantatory beauty whenever the narrator, Webster, talks about ‘Madam’. Webster is the driver for a rich family in Ghana, and Madam is the wife of his employer and the forbidden object of his affections. Selasi’s silken voice and intimacy with her own writing make her delivery a blissful seduction in itself. Try this out loud, huskily: “Madam has the contours of a girl I knew in Dansoman and sculptures sold at Arts Centre and Bitter Lemon bottles. Slender top and round the rest. A perfect holy roundness that is proof of God’s existence and His goodness furthermore.” Gorgeous.
In Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4 (2013), read online with a Granta digital subscription here
Read Zoe’s full Personal Anthology here.
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‘Heads of the Coloured People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology’ by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, introduced by Zakia Uddin
I think about the opening of this story a lot. It just unfolds perfectly. In second person, the narrator introduces us to Riley, who is on his way to a cosplay convention. He has blue contact lenses and bleached hair and ‘he was black. But this wasn’t any kind of self-hatred thing’. From there, Thompson-Spires sets out all the way he might fit into a reader’s conception of being ‘authentically’ black while also pointing out that none of those make the story about ‘about race or “the shame of being alive” or any of those things’. By constantly pre-empting the assumptions of the reader about Riley, Thompson-Spires creates a kind of negative space which makes us in danger of not seeing him, his own attempt at self-definition. Then the narrator acknowledges ‘there is so much awareness in these two paragraphs that I have hardly made space for Riley’. It is only later that we realise that this careful picture of Riley – and his preferences – serves a particular purpose, which might be guessed from the subtitle of the story. There’s an extract here.
First published in Story Quarterly 49, 2016. Collected in Heads of the Coloured People, Simon & Schuster/Chatto & Windus, 2018
Read Zakia’s full Personal Anthology here.
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‘How Many’ by Bryan Washington, introduced by Niven Govinden
This story was included in the NYers flash fiction series that ran over the summer. Bryan’s debut collection Lot, published earlier this year is amazing and essential. Every story’s an out and out banger. But what I loved about this flash piece was how it captured gay hook-up culture in several short paragraphs. It needs to be buried as a time capsule, that’s how fucking on it ‘How Many’ is. “The first one takes you back to his place, on Mandell. He asks you to top him and you do and that’s it. ….. The fifth one takes you home from Blur. You decide to let him fuck you.” No amount of emojis cover this brilliance.
First published in The New Yorker, August 8 2019 and available to read online here
Read Niven’s full Personal Anthology here.
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You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 1,000 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com