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Book Reviewed by:A bold and haunting debut story collection that follows various characters as they navigate the day-to-day perils of Jim Crow racism from Diane Oliver, a missing figure in the canon of twentieth-century African American literature, with an introduction by Tayari Jones
A remarkable talent far ahead of her time, Diane Oliver died in 1966 at the age of 22, leaving behind these crisply told and often chilling tales that explore race and racism in 1950s and 60s America. In this first and only collection by a masterful storyteller finally taking her rightful place in the canon, Oliver's insightful stories reverberate into the present day.
There's the nightmarish "The Closet on the Top Floor" in which Winifred, the first Black student at her newly integrated college, starts to physically disappear; "Mint Juleps not Served Here" where a couple living deep in a forest with their son go to bloody lengths to protect him; "Spiders Cry without Tears," in which a couple, Meg and Walt, are confronted by prejudices and strains of interracial and extramarital love; and the high tension titular story that follows a nervous older sister the night before her little brother is set to desegregate his school.
These are incisive and intimate portraits of African American families in everyday moments of anxiety and crisis that look at how they use agency to navigate their predicaments. As much a social and historical document as it is a taut, engrossing collection, Neighbors is an exceptional literary feat from a crucial once-lost figure of letters.
Diane Oliver's Neighbors and Other Stories challenged my own understanding of America, during and after de facto segregation. Each short story is an observation of individual lives. Oliver wrote many of these stories in her early 20s, during the early-to-mid '60s, and this posthumous collection brings a youthful, introspective twist to our comprehension of the time. It is a unique peek into the past, and, in many ways, a soothsaying of the future we're living in...continued
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(Reviewed by Lisa Ahima).
Diane Oliver's Neighbors and Other Stories is a collection delving deep into the corners of Black American life in the 1950s and '60s that were not and are still not usually part of the public conversation. Historical and academic writing that discusses the situations of marginalized people often does not touch on the intricacies of their daily lives, but fiction offers that opportunity. Here are some books of stories that portray Black Americans in a way that moves away from academic discussions of race and places readers inside the everyday experiences of people and communities.
The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories
by Gloria Naylor
This 1982 novel is written in a series of stories that follow ...
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If you liked Neighbors and Other Stories, try these:
by Jamel Brinkley
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From National Book Award finalist Jamel Brinkley, Witness is an elegant, insistent narrative of actions taken and not taken.
Stories from the Tenants Downstairs
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Set in a Harlem high rise, a stunning debut about a tight-knit cast of characters grappling with their own personal challenges while the forces of gentrification threaten to upend life as they know it.
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Dantiel W. Moniz, author of Milk Blood Heat
Direct and unromantic, what a glory of education Oliver gives us in craft, in the miraculous depiction of ordinary life, of enduring in love, family, and faith inside an insidious and voracious system, each sentence constructed to pass a reader deeper into the weaved world, rather than out of it. Each narrative resounds full-bodied and striking, bent on rendering the truths of the moment precisely. Oliver is indisputably a master. What woe this talent be stripped from us so early; what blessing this gift of stories remains.
