Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - Danielle Evans

Written by Danielle Evans
Read by Daniel Deadwyler, Jeanette Illidge, Je Nie Fleming, Brad Sanders, Olufemi Sowemimo
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

When Danielle Evans’ short story “Virgins” was published in The Paris Review in late 2007, it announced the arrival of a major new American short story writer. Written when she was only 23, Evans’ story of two Black, blue-collar 15-year-old girls’ flirtation with adulthood for one night was startling in its pitch-perfect examination of race, class, and the shifting terrain of adolescence.

Now this debut short story collection delivers on the promise of that early story. In “Harvest”, a college student’s unplanned pregnancy forces her to confront her own feelings of inadequacy in comparison to her White classmates. In “Jellyfish”, a father’s misguided attempt to rescue a gift for his grown daughter from an apartment collapse magnifies all he doesn’t know about her. And in “Snakes”, the mixed-race daughter of intellectuals recounts the disastrous summer she spent with her White grandmother and cousin, a summer that has unforeseen repercussions in the present.

Striking in their emotional immediacy, the stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self are based in a world where inequality is reality but where the insecurities of adolescence and young adulthood, and the tensions within family and the community, are sometimes the biggest complicating forces in one’s sense of identity and the choices one makes.

August 25 2020
6 hrs and 33 mins