Danielle Evans
Author of
The Office of Historical Corrections (Riverhead, 2020)
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead, 2010)
Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her first collection won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction; her second won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and The Bridge Book Award and was a finalist for The Aspen Prize, The Story Prize, and The LA Times Book prize for fiction. She is the 2021 winner of The New Literary Project Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree.
Danielle’s work has appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, Callaloo, and Phoebe, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, 2017, and 2018, and in New Stories from the South. She received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, previously taught creative writing at American University in Washington DC and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and currently teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Books by Danielle
The Office of Historical Corrections (Riverhead, 2020)
2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist
2021 Story Prize Finalist
2021 PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
2021 LA Times Book Prize Finalist
2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalist
The award-winning author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self brings her signature voice and insight to the subjects of race, grief, apology, and American history.
Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and x-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief—all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history—about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.
In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate-flag bikini goes viral. In “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain,” a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend’s unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a black scholar from Washington, DC, is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.
Praise
“[A] magnificent, searing collection of six stories and a novella.”
—The Washington Post
“Evans evinces a special vigilance toward threats that are familiar, in the sense of both inherited and routine. To read her is to become aware of ambience, of the peculiar iridescence that short fiction can sometimes offer: the stories are infused with many things but not precisely ‘about’ any of them. … Have I mentioned how funny Evans can be?”
—The New Yorker
“There is a rhythm to Danielle Evans’s writing that can, on the surface, betray the tensions roiling beneath the stories she tells. She writes about the haunting nature of memory, grief, and desire with a piercing subtlety that refuses any sort of cliché terms of closure . . . This collection is full of characters who attempt to escape, confront, or try their best to wade through circumstances that have quietly upended their lives, and Evans painstakingly outlines their aches.”
—The Nation
“Danielle Evans is a stone-cold genius, in possession of both a merciless eye and a merciful heart. And she keeps getting better.”
—Rebecca Makkai, National Book Award finalist for The Great Believers
“A dazzling collection. Contemporary life in Danielle Evans’s stories has a kind of incandescent and dangerous energy: even in moments of somberness or isolation, her characters crackle with heat, light, and self-awareness.”
—Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble
“To say that Danielle Evans is one of the best writers of her generation ignores the simple fact that she is one of America’s best writers, period. And to limit her to her own generation overlooks the keen eye Evans has placed on the continuum of American history and all its attendant complications of race, gender, class, popular culture, and representation. Evans wields these issues like a sly, acerbic blade, and she uses it to cut to the quick.”
—Wiley Cash, New York Times-bestselling author of The Last Ballad
“With the seven brilliant stories in The Office of Historical Corrections, Danielle Evans demonstrates, once again, that she is the finest short story writer working today. These stories are sly and prescient, a nuanced reflection of the world we are living in, one where the rules are changing, and truth is mutable and resentments about nearly everything have breached the surface of what is socially acceptable. These stories are wickedly smart and haunting in what they say about the human condition… Her language is nimble, her sentences immensely pleasurable to read, and in every single story there is a breathtaking surprise, an unexpected turn, a moment that will leave you speechless, and wanting more.”
—Roxane Gay, New York Times-bestselling author of Difficult Women and Bad Feminist
“Danielle Evans writes stories that make the world stop. Her work is so good that when you sit down with it, everything else ceases to exist. The stories in The Office of Historical Corrections move and breathe. The book is a beating heart. Magnificent.”
—Kristen Arnett, New York Times-bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead, 2010)
Winner of the PEN American Robert W. Bingham prize
Winner of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award
Winner of the Paterson Prize
A National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection
Introducing a new star of her generation, an electric debut story collection about young African-American and mixed-race teens, women, and men struggling to find a place in their families and communities.
When Danielle Evans’s short story “Virgins” was published in The Paris Review in late 2007, it announced the arrival of a bold new voice. Written when she was only 23, Evans’s story of two fifteen-year-old girls’ flirtation with adulthood for one night, experimenting with the dangers and temptations of sex and the limits of friendship, was startling in its pitch-perfect detail and fresh examination of race, class, and the shifting terrain of adolescence. Now, with her debut collection, Evans delivers on the promise of that early story. Emotionally honest and bristling with insight and keen observation, the stories that make up Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self feature young African-American and mixed-race women and men and explore the complex dynamics that underlie the relationships between family members and friends.
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 highlights 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.
All of Evans’s stories are striking in their immediacy. Her take on race and class is smart and subtle, these are not the defining aspect of her characters’ lives. Her concern is depicting the way in which the insecurities of adolescence and young adulthood, the tensions of family, and issues of race and class complicate one’s sense of identity and the choices one makes.
Praise
“Danielle Evans is funny as hell. Which only makes all the heartbreak 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 La Valle, author of Big Machine
“Danielle Evans makes you laugh with recognition while showing you the consequences of human nature. Her 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