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.
Paris, 1887. Gustave Eiffel wants to build the tallest tower in the world, yet no one seems to have faith that his absurd steel colossus will be finished in time for the World’s Fair – except, that is, for his bold daughter Claire. At a time when it is still thought unseemly for a woman to go for a walk on her own, she is her father’s most valued advisor. But Eiffel has to contend with more than deadlines. Paris’s cultural elite, led by Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas, think their city is being mutilated, and are taking a stand. Claire has her own worries too: her husband, young engineer Adolphe, is in charge of the high-risk construction of the tower’s top, and her fears for his safety are threatening to destroy their marriage. Then a worker is killed in a fall, and Claire meets handsome reporter Gordon Bennett, who promises her a carefree new life in America. Will she choose the Eiffel Tower, or a future in the New World?
Cressi Catterberg is freshly in love with gorgeous Mika. She feels that he might be the one – if only she didn’t suffer from commitment-phobia. And if only she wasn’t convinced that her true love is actually Mr Lindholm, her therapist. Emotional upheaval is just one of her problems: there’s her family too – or rather, her two sisters and three aunts, who constantly stick their nose into her business. But most of her energy is taken up with the café she has inherited from her mother, for which she has big plans. Mr Lindholm and Cressi’s aunts know it’s time Cressi started believing in herself – and in Mika.
Danzig, 1856. When young Johanna Berendt finds herself standing in front of the big villa in Langgasse Street, she feels deeply embarrassed. She eloped with a pianist just a few months ago, but now she’s back and hoping that her family will forgive her. Yet a shock awaits Johanna: her father has died, and her brother is now in charge of the family and their long-established merchant business. And he has no time for his freedom-loving sister.
