Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - 9781594487699

"Danielle Evans is funny as hell. Which only makes all the heart-break in these stories more surprising and satisfying. The young women in this collection are always on the edge of real trouble, but don't be fooled, they're the dangerous ones, Written with wonderful clarity and a novelist's sense of scope. Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self is a fabulous literary debut."---Victor Lavalle, author of Big Machine

"Danielle Evans's stories are fresh, arresting, real. The young women and men in them could be sitting across from you on the subway or strolling past you on a college campus. And the young woman who brings them to us is a writer to watch."---Martha Southgate, author of The Fall of Rome

"Danielle Evans's considerable talents are in evidence on every page of this impressive debut. She finds her often surprising dramatic material in the un-expected asides of modern life, with results that are intense, intelligent, humane, and funny. I look forward to reading more."---Daniel Alarcon, author of Lost City Radio

"Wise, funny, starting stories. Full of hard truths about sex and race in America, and what it's like to grow up fast in a slow changing country, this brave collection will make you laugh and clutch your heart at the same time."---Eric Puchner, author of Music Through the floor

"Evans's knife-sharp wit and tender but unflinching eye create a range of characters who are entirely sympathetic, even as they tumble headlong into their own mistakes."---V.V. Ganeshananthan. author of Love Marriage

"Quietly magnetic, Evans's voice draws us into richly charged worlds where innocence isn't lost but escaped. and where pieces of the past reassemble in the present with the inevitable geometry of kaleidoscope glass. Delivered with a light touch that belies their maturity, these morally complex stories mark the arrival of a gifted new author."---Sana Krasikov. author of One More Year

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self introduces a stunningly confident voice in fiction. Fearless, funny, and ultimatly tender, Danielle Evans's stories offer a bold new perspective on the experience of being young and African-American or mixed-race in modern-day America. They feature young women and men who find themselves straddling the divide in cultures, classes, relationships, and ideas about who they are and who they want to be.

Evans's arresting talent was first announced when "Virgins" debuted in The Paris Review in 2007, when she was only twenty-three. This story of two blue-collar teenagers' flirtation with adulthood for one night, their experimentation with the dangers and temptations of sex and the limits of friendship, is startling in its pitch-perfect detail, refreshing in its examination of race, class, and the shifting terrain of adolescence.

The exciting promise of that early story is satisfied in this collection. In "Harvest," a college student's unexpected pregnancy brings up lingering feelings of inadequacy in relation to her white classmates. In "Robert E. Lee Is Dead," teenage girls in the still deeply divided South help one another survive high school despite their differences. In "Jellyfish," a father's misguided attempt to rescue from an apartment collapse a gift for his grown daughter highlights all that he doesn't know about her. And in "Snakes," a mixed-race girl spends the summer with her white grandmother, only to become the casualty of her family's deep-rooted tensions.

In each of these stories, Evans explores the nonwhite experience in contemporary America with honesty, wisdom, and humor. They are striking in their emotional immediacy, based in a world where inequality is a reality, and where the insecurities of young adulthood and tensions within family are often even more complicating factors.