Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * Winner of the Whiting Award * Longlisted for the National Book Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize * Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize * Finalist for the Kirkus Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Named a Best Book of the Year by Refinery29, NPR, The Root, HuffPost, Vanity Fair, Bustle, Chicago Tribune, PopSugar, and The Undefeated

In one of the season's most acclaimed works of fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires offers "a firecracker of a book... a triumph of storytelling: intelligent, acerbic, and ingenious" (Financial Times).

Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with race, identity politics, and the contemporary middle class in this "vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive" (George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo) collection.

Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous -- two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids' backpacks -- while others are devastatingly poignant. In the title story, when a cosplayer, dressed as his favorite anime character, is mistaken for a violent threat the consequences are dire; in another story, a teen struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with so-called black culture.

Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. Boldly resisting categorization and easy answers, Nafissa Thompson-Spires "has taken the best of what Toni Cade Bambara, Morgan Parker, and Junot Díaz do plus a whole lot of something we've never seen in American literature, blended it all together... giving us one of the finest short-story collections" (Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division).

• We started tracking this book on November 30, 2017.
• This book was $11.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 12 times in the past 2,940 days.
• The current price of this book is $2.99 last checked 3 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past year.
• The lowest price to date was $1.99 last reached on January 27, 2024.
• This book has been $1.99 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $14.99 last reached on March 6, 2024.
• This book has been $14.99 2 times since we started tracking it.

• Literature & FictionLiterary FictionBlack & African American

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 226 Pages
• File Size: 29 KB