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    Heads of the Colored People: Stories
    Heads of the Colored People: Stories
    Heads of the Colored People: Stories
    Audiobook6 hours

    Heads of the Colored People: Stories

    Written by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

    Narrated by Adenrele Ojo

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    A stunning new talent in literary fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with black identity and the contemporary middle class in these compelling, boundary-pushing vignettes.

    Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous-from two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids' backpacks, to the young girl contemplating how best to notify her Facebook friends of her impending suicide-while others are devastatingly poignant-a new mother and funeral singer who is driven to madness with grief for the young black boys who have fallen victim to gun violence, or the teen who struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with black culture.

    Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. Her stories are exquisitely rendered, satirical, and captivating in turn, engaging in the ongoing conversations about race and identity politics, as well as the vulnerability of the black body. Boldly resisting categorization and easy answers, Nafissa Thompson-Spires is an original and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJul 10, 2018
    ISBN9781684413713
    Author

    Nafissa Thompson-Spires

    Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Illinois. Her work has appeared in Story Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist Wire, among other publications. She was a 2016 fellow of the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop. She is the author of the short story collection Heads of the Colored People.

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    Reviews for Heads of the Colored People

    4/5

    124 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Very sophisticated short stories that leave you laughing, pondering, and reflecting. Some of the stories were better than others but overall it was a good read.
    • 5/5
      This short story collection was brilliant. I love her writing. They were funny, sad, weird, thoughtful, and thought provoking. I definitely recommend this story collection.
    • 5/5
      This a collection that has to be read as a whole. Individually, some of the stories feel too pat and distanced. But taken all together, the vision is much broader, especially if read as "sketches." Many are quick bits, often ironic, vicious at times to their characters. But this is not a somber book; it is not Black trauma porn. The characters get to have a range and the author uses a range of tones that often Black texts don't "get" to have. The overall effect is rich is a way individual stories aren't. It took me a while to get this. The last story pulls no punches and scared me and then left me hopeful.
    • 4/5
      A collection of short stories that aren't afraid to look at uncomfortable and sometimes painful experiences. I particularly found the stories on women's experience of mental health and illness really strong, from the woman trying to recover from childhood abuse to a desperately ill single mum trying to work out what will happen to her baby. African American experiences of racism in school, of aspirational middle class parents. In some of the stories characters reappear, and perspectives on earlier stories change. Read in June 2020, the first story packs a particular punch.
    • 4/5
      A wonderful collection of stories. This is a writer I'll read again. The dark stories weren't for me, but I enjoyed her humor.
    • 4/5
      These short stories focus on the struggles of middle- and upper-middle-class blacks, who don't fit into what we stereotypically think of black society and who aren't accepted into white society. Many characters appear in more than one story, which I enjoyed. A great read.
    • 3/5
      Some of the stories in this book were well done but most of them seemed to end abruptly and since I was listening to this book, not reading a print copy, they just left me hanging. To tell the truth that is often how I feel about short fiction. It takes a real master (like Alice Munro) to craft a satisfying short story.Most of the black people in these stories are from well-to-do families and their issues don't seem to stem from the colour of their skin so much as their following of trends. In the one story that I thought was funny two moms of black girls going to a private school exchange barbed letters about how their girls are interacting. As I say it was pretty funny but not really the kind of problem most black people face. Oh well, chalk it up to the fail column for me and short fiction.