Heads of the Colored People: Stories

n*Winner of the PEN Open Book Award* n *Winner of the Whiting Award* n *Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize* n *Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize* n *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize* n Included in Best Books of 2018 Lists from Refinery29, NPR, The Root, HuffPost, Vanity Fair, Bustle, Chicago Tribune, PopSugar, and The Undefeated. n n In one of the season's most acclaimed works of fiction--longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the PEN Open Book Award--Nafissa Thompson-Spires offers a firecracker of a book...a triumph of storytelling: intelligent, acerbic, and ingenious (Financial Times). n nNafissa 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. n n 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. n n 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 D az 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).n