Starred Kirkus Review for Danielle Evans’ Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

Congratulations, Danielle!!

“Young, intelligent African-Americans become vehicles for their own undoing in this collection of eight stories.

Armed with no easy answers but plenty of bad choices, the talented, too-smart-for-their-own-good protagonists are painfully aware of the consequences of their actions, even when they think they have no better choice. The 15-year-old girl in “Virgins” guiltily opts for the lesser of two evils after leaving her best friend in a precarious situation. A young mixed-race girl exiled to her white grandmother’s Tallahassee home for the summer learns a rough lesson in racial disparity—and the power of a lie. A traumatized Iraq War veteran who becomes a surrogate father to his ex’s little daughter sees his good intentions backfire, big time, over his poor judgment. In “The King of a Vast Empire,” a young man who is talked into a risky road trip with his college-coed sister recalls how shaped they both were by a childhood car accident that destroyed the structure of their family, while leaving it externally intact. After being casually cruel to the fiancé of her former lover, the drifting young woman in “Wherever You Go, There You Are” sees an opportunity for both of them to move on, even if she is not exactly ready. But the moral ambiguity of Evans’s achingly believable world finds its best expression in the devastating final story, “Robert E. Lee is Dead,” in which the brainy black cheerleader, CeeCee, jeopardizes her own high-school graduation with a pointless act of vandalism. Although she is instigated by her closest friend Geena, whose future is less bright, CeeCee’s decision is her own. She shares this characteristic with the other survivors in this arresting book, along with the regret.

A welcome new talent—with a funny and dark take on being black in America.”

On short stories

I came back from Iowa with a huge stack of manuscripts and many of them are short stories. Some of these short stories are very beautiful. They are like little pearls, polished and gleaming, every sentence perfect. Several of the students, who had met with other agents, told me they knew short stories were really hard to sell, the agents had told them so. And of course I had to agree. But I started thinking about how much I love short stories; and I felt a twinge of regret that as a genre they have become so marginalized in mainstream literature. As Stephen King writes, “a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an affair or a marriage, but kisses can be sweet, and their very brevity forms their own attraction.” Short stories can attain perfection in the way that the novel, with its unwieldy length and many plot strands and extensive cast of characters, never can. What is more perfect after all than a story by Grace Paley or Alice Munro? Never was I more entranced than when reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth. There is a completeness to the experience of reading a short story: you are pulled into the world created therein and for the time it takes you to ride the bus to work or school you are elsewhere; by the time the bus delivers you to your destination you are ready to shake yourself off and re-enter your own life, but your perspective has shifted slightly, the air feels a little different.

As an agent I thank those editors at publishing houses who are willing to take a chance on short story collections and all those who toil at literary journals and are doing so much to keep this form alive.