#Jamel Brinkley

[princess-kaldor]

From "Witness" by Jamel Brinkley

Collage made by @princess-kaldor

[jojoware]

According to the terms of her personal lexicon, a woman was a lady only if she was fascinating and ungovernable, and my mother considered herself nothing if not a lady. – from Witness: Stories by Jamel Brinkley

[longreads]

Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2024

Andre Dubus III, Hiromi Kawakami, Jamel Brinkley, Jonathan Escoffery, and Pegah Ouji are just half the fine authors featured in Pravesh Bhardwaj's annual collection of ten outstanding stories to read online for free!

[nativemindstate]

Following three generations of East New Yorkers; a debut, coming-of-age novel that mixes magical realism and the Southern Gothic--for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Jamel Brinkley.

Taking place over thirty years, We Are a Haunting follows a family of East New Yorkers struggling to maintain a connection to their history. Grandma Audrey, herself a living ancestor among the speaking dead, is about to lose her apartment; her indelible and vivacious daughter Key dies young after serving the Black women of her neighborhood, leaving behind a grieving son, Colly, who holds deep-seated disdain for a community to which he has no choice but to be accountable.

Going back to the '80s, we see Key's life consisting of nightclubs and enchantment. While training as a doula, she discovers that for her, the dead are much closer than expected and learns how to speak both to and for them, forming a connection between passed and living family members. After her death, Colly soon discovers that he shares the same sacred gift his mother had.

His expulsion from school forces Colly across town, where he forges an understanding of how friendship, family, and community foster love in places where it may seem inherently and systemically impossible. After college, Colly returns to East New York to work with community organizers addressing structural neglect and the crumbling NYCHA blocks; to do what he can for the people that mean the most to him.

With a singular combination of urban fiction, the supernatural, and social critique, Tyriek White depicts the palpable, breathing essence of outer borough New York City with lyricism and deep significance.

Art by Romare Bearden

Design by Rodrigo Corral

[rockislandadultreads]

2024 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence: Fiction Longlist

Introducing a handful of nominees from the fiction longlist for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence! To see the entire longlist, click here.

Witness by Jamel Brinkley

What does it mean to take action? To bear witness? What does it cost?

In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters - from children to grandmothers to ghosts - live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect, to remember, to stand up for, and to really see each other, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape not only their own futures but the legacies and prospects of their families and their city.

In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations, where strangers might sometimes show kindness while those we trust - doctors, employers, siblings - too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill, dancing in the street, glimpsing your purpose, change on the horizon.

With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city.

All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.

Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart.

As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.

The Water Outlaws by S.L. Lunag

In the jianghu, you break the law to make it your own.

Lin Chong is an expert arms instructor, training the Emperor's soldiers in sword and truncheon, battle axe and spear, lance and crossbow. Unlike bolder friends who flirt with challenging the unequal hierarchies and values of Imperial society, she believes in keeping her head down and doing her job.

Until a powerful man with a vendetta rips that carefully-built life away.

Disgraced, tattooed as a criminal, and on the run from an Imperial Marshall who will stop at nothing to see her dead, Lin Chong is recruited by the Bandits of Liangshan. Mountain outlaws on the margins of society, the Liangshan Bandits proclaim a belief in justice—for women, for the downtrodden, for progressive thinkers a corrupt Empire would imprison or destroy. They’re also murderers, thieves, smugglers, and cutthroats.

Apart, they love like demons and fight like tigers. Together, they could bring down an empire.

Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin

There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies—everything in between is speculation.

After the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Thanh, and Minh begin a perilous journey to Hong Kong with the promise that their parents and younger siblings will soon follow. But when tragedy strikes, the three children are left orphaned, and sixteen-year-old Anh becomes the caretaker for her two younger brothers overnight.

In the years that follow, Anh and her brothers resettle in the UK and confront their new identities as refugees, first in overcrowded camps and resettlement centers and then, later, in a modernizing London plagued by social inequality and raging anti-immigrant sentiment. Anh works in a clothing factory to pay their bills. Minh loiters about with fellow unemployed high school dropouts. Thanh, the youngest, plays soccer with his British friends after class. As they mature, each sibling reckons with survivor’s guilt, unmoored by their parents’ absence. With every choice they make, their paths diverge further, until it’s unclear if love alone can keep them together.

Told through lyrical narrative threads, historical research, voices from lost family, and notes by an unnamed narrator determined to chart their fate, Wandering Souls captures the lives of a family marked by war and loss yet relentless in the pursuit of a better future. With urgency and precision, it affirms that the most important stories are those we claim for ourselves, establishing Cecile Pin as a masterful new literary voice.

[fiercynn]

Yesterday, a group of writers, editors, and academics known as the Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG)—an ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people and modeled on American Writers Against the War in Vietnam—published this statement of solidarity/open letter. So far, the letter has received over 4000 signatures, including those of Ocean Vuong, Lilly Wachowski, Leslie Jamison, Jia Tolentino, Jonathan Lethem, Valeria Luiselli, Jamel Brinkley, Jami Attenberg, Laura van den Berg, Alexandra Kleeman, NoViolet Bulawayo, Max Porter, and Maaza Mengiste. If you’re an American writer, editor, journalist, educator, or cultural worker who finds yourself horrified by the ongoing carnage in Gaza, horrified at the near unanimity of approval this situation has received in Congress, horrified by the stifling of dissent and the threats to the livelihoods of your artistic peers, please sign and share this letter.

[thingsreadinthedark]

3.5/5 ..

More real thoughts include: .. I wanted more of something… even tho I don’t all of what exactly. That last story captured the fuck shit that happens to a lot of women who let ain’t shit dudes around them who just shouldn’t be there. It’s okay to be alone, sis! Let em go to a shelter! Just say no to the hobosexuals.

[qudachuk]

Gentrification is a recurring theme in the Brooklyn writer’s second short-story collectionJamel Brinkley’s 2019 debut short story collection, A Lucky Man, announced an important new voice in anglophone fiction, a technically skilled storyteller with a particular talent for...

[otherpplnation]

856. Jamel Brinkley

Jamel Brinkley is the author of the story collection Witness, available from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories, which won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He has also been awarded an O. Henry Prize, the Rome Prize, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, A Public Space, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. He was raised in the Bronx and in Brooklyn, New York, and currently teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

***

A SPECIAL OFFER for Otherppl listeners! Use the offer code SUMMERSCHOOL and get 10% off of all summer writing workshops at https://www.chillsubs.com/writeordie/education

***

Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.

Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, etc.

Subscribe to Brad Listi’s email newsletter.

Support the show on Patreon

Merch

@otherppl

Instagram 

YouTube

TikTok

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

www.otherppl.com

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: What Does It Mean to Be a Witness? by Mateo Askaripour

By Mateo Askaripour In his new story collection, Jamel Brinkley investigates the impact of seeing and being seen. Published: July 31, 2023 at 05:00AM from NYT Books https://ift.tt/bmtzihN via IFTTT

[poetsandwriters]

There are certain works I return to that make me want to write, that never fail to punch me in the gut and wash out my eyes....It’s not that these immediately get the sentences flowing again; many times I’ll reread them, or others among my favorites, and afterwards I’ll still fail to set down even a word. It’s that they prevent me from succumbing to numbness and despair, even as they take me into what are often the deepest depths of sadness. They make me feel, in powerful ways that shift writing back into the realm of the possible, which, for me, is enough.

Jamel Brinkley, in this week’s Writers Recommend; read the rest at pw.org!

[bigtickhk]

A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley 

US: http://amzn.to/2tw9cSk 

UK: https://amzn.to/2S2wvOF

[prairielights]

Please join us tonight with @writers_at_grinnell for a reading with Jamel Brinkley and a conversation with recent Grinnell graduates. Link to register in our bio ✨ (at Prairie Lights Bookstore) https://www.instagram.com/p/CFhnOPnHLSN/?igshid=1jnejpbkc9yrf