THE CONFOUNDING INSISTENCE ON INNOCENCE
THE DEBUT story collection by Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, was published in 2010, when the author was just twenty-six years old. Rightly heralded as a significant new voice in American short fiction, Evans was selected a year later as a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. And although her work has regularly appeared in a number of publications during the intervening years—her credits include the Paris Review and A Public Space, and her writing has been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories series no less than four times—readers have waited a decade for a new book by Evans, a recent National Endowment for the Arts fellow.
The wait is over. In November, Riverhead Books will publish her new collection of stories and a novella, The Office of Historical Corrections. Not that Evans, who teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, is overly concerned with the decade-long gap. “If we’re chasing potentially impossible goals anyway,” she told me, “you chase a book you hope will be read for a long time, not a book that will be finished quickly.”
Evans’s new, gorgeously crafted stories are at once timely and timeless. Roxane Gay writes that with this collection, “Danielle Evans demonstrates, once again, that she is the finest short story writer working today.” The story “Happily Ever After” follows a young woman who finds her life petrified in the wake of her mother’s death. In a moving sequence that will resonate with many Black women in America, Evans describes a character dressing carefully for her mother’s doctor’s appointment because “she had to look like a real person to them, like a person whose mother deserved to live, like someone who loved somebody.” In another story that conjures the #MeToo movement, women respond to the overtures of a seemingly reformed “genius artist” who has wronged them, delivering the ultimate comeuppance. Evans has a wicked sense of humor and is a keen observer of her characters’ exterior and interior lives. When a woman in the book imagines her own mother asking, “Are you a young lady or a cow?” readers are reminded that they are in Evans’s
