A richly detailed, brilliantly woven debut collection about the lives and lore of one Black family.
COMPANY: Stories
by Shannon Sanders
Graywolf Press, October 2023
(via DeFiore and Co.)
Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, COMPANY tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.
Each piece in COMPANY includes a moment when a guest arrives at someone’s home. In « The Good, Good Men, » two brothers reunite to oust a « deadbeat » boyfriend from their mother’s house. In « The Everest Society, » the brothers’ sister anxiously prepares for a home visit from a social worker before adopting a child. In « Birds of Paradise, » their aunt, newly promoted to university provost, navigates a minefield of microaggressions at her own welcome party. And in the haunting title story, the provost’s sister finds her solitary life disrupted when her late sister’s daughter comes calling.
These are stories about intimacy, societal and familial obligations, and the ways inheritances shape our fates. Buoyant, somber, sharp, and affectionate, this collection announces a remarkable new voice in fiction.
Shannon Sanders lives and works near Washington, DC. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, Joyland, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and was a 2020 winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers
Estranged from her family, Natasha is making a life for herself in Darwin when her sister calls with bad news. Their mother is ill, and has only a few months to live. Confused and conflicted, Natasha returns to the home she fled many years before. But her father, an evangelical Christian, has not changed—he is still the domineering yet magnetic man she ran from, and her sisters and mother are still in his thrall.
Many people think that protecting our climate and democracy are mutually exclusive. For some, the fight against climate change is moving too slowly, while others are already feeling threatened by the prospect of an « eco-dictatorship ». In DEMOKRATIE IM FEUER, journalist Schaible shows that protecting the climate and democracy are actually prerequisites for each other. Without one, the other will become impossible. He exposes false contradictions, and argues that what we need is « climate democracy » – for the climate crisis is already starting to limit our freedoms, and we’ll only be able to save the planet by democratic means. DEMOKRATIE IM FEUER takes a new look at the relationship between democracy and climate change, and sketches an optimistic vision of a future where the two reinforce each other.
Our relationship with other people, closeness and intimacy has fundamentally changed. This is due not only to the « safe distances » and lockdowns of the past couple of years or so, but to a social trend that has merely been intensified by the pandemic – as evidenced by rising divorce rates, an increase in polyamorous relationships, the rising number of single households and political discussions around « responsible communities ».
Pacemakers, running blades, stem cell research, life-prolonging medicine: these achievements might sound normal, but they are all part of what is called transhumanism. Transhumanism stipulates that humanity’s next evolutionary step will come about through the use of modern science and technology, but many people see it as a dangerous endeavour. They fear that it will dehumanise us, that we’ll become « cyborgised » and open ourselves up to ethically questionable genetic experiments and state-sponsored eugenics.