Heads of the Colored People : Stories

*Winner of the PEN Open Book Award* *Winner of the Whiting Award* *Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize* *Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize* * Finalist for the Kirkus Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize* Included in Best Books of 2018 Lists from Refinery29, NPR, The Root , HuffPost , Vanity Fair , Bustle , Chicago Tribune , PopSugar , and The Undefeated. In one of the season's most acclaimed works of fiction--longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the PEN Open Book Award--Nafissa Thompson-Spires offers "a firecracker of a book...a triumph of storytelling: intelligent, acerbic, and ingenious" ( Financial Times ). Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with race, identity politics, and the contemporary middle class in this "vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive" (George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo ) collection. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous--two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids' backpacks--while others are devastatingly poignant. In the title story, when a cosplayer, dressed as his favorite anime character, is mistaken for a violent threat the consequences are dire; in another story, a teen struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with so-called black culture. Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. Boldly resisting categorization and easy answers, Nafissa Thompson-Spires "has taken the best of what Toni Cade Bambara, Morgan Parker, and Junot D az do plus a whole lot of something we've never seen in American literature, blended it all together...giving us one of the finest short-story collections" (Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division ).