Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? : Stories
Author(s): Kathleen Collins
“From the first page you know you're in the hands of an exceptional writer… I adored this book.” —Zadie Smith
“Sexy and radical and intimate.” —Miranda July
Named a Best Book of 2016 by VICE, Elle, Nylon, Publishers Weekly and NPR
Named one of the most anticipated books of the fall by the Huffington Post, New York, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, and The Millions
Now available in Ecco’s Art of the Story series: a never-before-published collection of stories from a brilliant yet little known African American artist and filmmaker—a contemporary of revered writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Laurie Colwin, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Grace Paley—whose prescient work has recently resurfaced to wide acclaim.
Humorous, poignant, perceptive, and full of grace, Kathleen Collins’s stories masterfully blend the quotidian and the profound in a personal, intimate way, exploring deep, far-reaching issues—race, gender, family, and sexuality—that shape the ordinary moments in our lives.
In “The Uncle,” a young girl who idolizes her handsome uncle and his beautiful wife makes a haunting discovery about their lives. In “Only Once,” a woman reminisces about her charming daredevil of a lover and his ultimate—and final—act of foolishness. Collins’s work seamlessly integrates the African-American experience in her characters’ lives, creating rich, devastatingly familiar, full-bodied men, women, and children who transcend the symbolic, penetrating both the reader’s head and heart.
Both contemporary and timeless, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? is a major addition to the literary canon, and is sure to earn Kathleen Collins the widespread recognition she is long overdue.
Review(s):
“From the first page you know you’re in the hands of an exceptional writer... Collins’ stories are passionate and light-footed, angry but also delicate - they move like quicksilver... She’s deliciously funny. She speaks of the many-sided lives of black women with care and intelligence. I adored this book.”
“Sexy and radical and intimate.”
“Sharp, tender, and precise--full of wit and pleasure. Reading [Collins] feels likes eavesdropping on an electric historical moment from a secret perch just above the kitchen table. I lost myself in these stories with a sense of wrestling and delight, grateful for the crackles and surprises they continually delivered.”
“These stories offer a sharp, clear, unsentimental vision of race in the sixties, the mingling of politics and desire, the search for place that will be both exotic and familiar to modern readers, richly historical and utterly recognizable.”
“[A] lost treasure... this jewel of a book illuminates big timeless themes of familial ties and self-determination, group affinity and individualism, lovers and the power plays between them in a way that feels completely new.”.
“A posthumous masterpiece. . . . A triumph.”
“In this slim, devastating collection, Kathleen Collins writes of interracial America like no one before or since. This is a daringly complex vision of both blackness and whiteness by a writer who was utterly ahead of her time.”
Kathleen Collins writes with an immediacy and vividness that is exhilarating to read. She inhabits a landscape that sidesteps political or sexual correctness in favor of emotional truth-telling...Throughout it all there is a brio that is contagious.
“Kathleen Collins has the dramatist’s gift for multiple voices and viewpoints...How well she understands mixed motives, emotions and bloodlines. Histories and legacies at cross-purposes. Elective and compulsive affinities, both intellectual and erotic. How unlucky we were to lose her. And how lucky we are to have these stories.”
“This book is one of the most eloquent statements I have read of what it was like to be black and young and alive in the 1960s. I applaud its publication.”
ISBN: 9780062484154