One character, looking after her 14-year-old cousin (Grandfather is dying, Mother is at a church retreat), sums it up heartbreakingly well: ‘I feel kind of sorry for her entire generation, because they’ve learned all the theatrical parts of sex so they walk around pouting and posing. (The notion that ‘we are safe, with our families, until we are not’ is a preoccupation here.) In Evans’s world, virginity is a card to play quickly and strategically. At a store in the mall, ‘girls 3 and up could get manicures.’ Parents, whether two subway stops away or on a research trip in Brazil, are unaware of their transgressions. The New York Times Book Review says “Rather than limiting the collection’s gaze, this perspective amplifies the universal pitfalls of coming of age in 21st-century America.
No, she’s not the America’s Next Top Model of the same name - that would just be too much - but she’s captivating in a far more profound way.” At 26, this D.C.-area author has already graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, earned praise from Salman Rushdie and Richard Russo, and appeared in two (two!) volumes of “Best American Short Stories.” Now comes the publication of her first collection, “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self,” eight quietly devastating stories that validate the hype. The Washington Postsays “I hope Danielle Evans is a very nice person because that might be her only defense against other writers’ seething envy. It is a co-winner of the 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize for a first book, a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection for 2011, the winner of the 2011 Paterson Prize for Fiction and the 2011 Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and an honorable mention for the 2011 PEN/Hemingway award.You can order the collection here, here, here, or here.īefore You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self is now also available from Audible as an audiobook.
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, published in 2010 by Riverhead Books, is a collection of eight short stories, some of which have appeared in magazines and anthologies including The Paris Review, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories From the South.
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