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Summary
Summary
"From the first page you know you're in the hands of an exceptional writer... I adored this book." --Zadie Smith
"Sexy and radical and intimate." --Miranda July
Named a Best Book of 2016 by VICE, Elle, Nylon, Publishers Weekly and NPR
Named one of the most anticipated books of the fall by the Huffington Post, New York, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, and The Millions
Now available in Ecco's Art of the Story series: a never-before-published collection of stories from a brilliant yet little known African American artist and filmmaker--a contemporary of revered writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Laurie Colwin, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Grace Paley--whose prescient work has recently resurfaced to wide acclaim.
Humorous, poignant, perceptive, and full of grace, Kathleen Collins's stories masterfully blend the quotidian and the profound in a personal, intimate way, exploring deep, far-reaching issues--race, gender, family, and sexuality--that shape the ordinary moments in our lives.
In "The Uncle," a young girl who idolizes her handsome uncle and his beautiful wife makes a haunting discovery about their lives. In "Only Once," a woman reminisces about her charming daredevil of a lover and his ultimate--and final--act of foolishness. Collins's work seamlessly integrates the African-American experience in her characters' lives, creating rich, devastatingly familiar, full-bodied men, women, and children who transcend the symbolic, penetrating both the reader's head and heart.
Both contemporary and timeless, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? is a major addition to the literary canon, and is sure to earn Kathleen Collins the widespread recognition she is long overdue.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Race, gender, love, and sexuality are portrayed beautifully and humanely in this previously unpublished collection of stories from groundbreaking African-American filmmaker and civil rights activist Collins, who died in 1988 at the age of 46. Drawing on Collins's career as a filmmaker and playwright, the stories incorporate stage directions, dramatic monologues, and camera-eye perspectives that frame the racial tension of the 1960s with both frankness and tenderness. "Exteriors" details a failing relationship from the outside, set up as a film scene through a lighting designer's eye, while "Interiors" gives us the inner monologues from the perspectives of the couple in a failed marriage. The title story follows a group of interracial couples as each member explores his/her own identity while trying to fit in with the identity of the other. In the gripping "Only Once," a woman recalls her thrill-seeking lover and his final act of recklessness. "The Happy Family" seems happy on the surface, but a closer look by the family's friend reveals the cracks that broke the family apart. Full of candor, humor, and poise, this collection, so long undiscovered, will finally find the readers it deserves. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Written during the 1960s and 70s, these posthumously published stories from the civil rights activist and film-maker seem startlingly prescient When in 1975 Alice Walker, working as an editor on Ms. Magazine in New York, received a batch of stories from an unknown writer, there must have been a moment of recognition: like Walker, fledgling author Kathleen Collins was black, tertiary educated, a former civil rights activist and had married a white man. Walker's tardy response -- "We kept these so long because we liked them so much ... I wanted to buy them as a set" -- could not disguise the polite rejection that followed. For three decades the stories kept the company of woodlice in a trunk where Collins's forgotten manuscripts lay yellowing and undisturbed. Now, through happenstance and the determination of her daughter, readers may be as surprised as I was by the rich range of the seasoned literary voice -- modern, confident, emotionally intelligent and humorous -- that emerges from the pages of the posthumously published Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? The title of this collection poses a pertinent question: actually, whatever did become of the heady promise of interracial love amid the racial conflagrations of 1960s USA? The reality never lived up to the Hollywood fantasy of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, in which Sidney Poitier's "negro" doctor -- with perfect manners, starched collar and ultra-clean fingernails -- falls in love with a young white liberal woman. The suggestion that love might soften if not conquer differences between the races is echoed in the radical fervour of Collins's characters. They include dilettantes ("everyone who is anyone will find at least one 'negro' to bring home to dinner") and the committed -- black and white people putting their bodies on the line, idealists who march, ride the freedom buses, and sometimes, in deliciously illicit affairs, lie down together. Many of the stories are inversions of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, with young black female protagonists. These sexual and racial adventurers contravene social mores and upset their class-conscious relatives, whose aspirations for family members' courtships and unions with the lighter-skinned do not extend to dangerous liaisons with white folk. Collins adopts an unflinching prose style, as bold as the character with "a cold longing weighted" between her legs who yearns for "a little light fucking" with a man who is not cursed "with a penis about the size of a pea". But she also deftly complicates the perceived limits of free love in her description of a heroine tormented by memories of her partner unbuttoning himself in front of other women. The stories were written in the late 1960s and 70s, when black power exploded, and have a persistently delightful quality of spring awakening, with sassy flower-bedecked students in bell-bottomed trousers and rollneck sweaters. Their free spirits are contrasted with their anxious, middle-class fathers, for whom the revolution has come too soon, and who fret that by cutting off their carefully groomed hair, their expensively educated daughters are also severing opportunities for advancement -- that they will become "just like any other coloured girl". The pathos in these often thinly veiled biographical tales is reserved for this older generation. An energetic widowed undertaker, who "won't sit still long enough to die", shares the upbringing of his only child with a disapproving mother-in-law. [In another story?], an uncle is forever "broke but still so handsome and beautiful, lazy and generous", his light skin a noble lie of possibilities that are never realised; his life, a long lament, closes as he "cried himself to death". Collins taught film at the City College of New York, and some stories, cutting between scenes and characters, are rendered almost as film scripts, with the reader in place of the camera panning back and forth, adding subtle layers of inference and meaning. The stories speak to each other, eliding time, allowing characters who are versions of each other to reveal and deepen aspects hinted at previously. In defying convention with their interracial love, Collins's headstrong black protagonists are far more vulnerable when love fails: they can't go on, and yet there's no going back. Exposed and humiliated, they find solace in the anonymity of the uncaring metropolis. "I relieved the outer edges of my sadness," says a forsaken lover in one of the most poignant stories, "Interiors", "letting it blend with the surf-like monotony of the cars splashing below the faint, luminescent splendour of the New York skyline." Paul Valery wrote that a work of art is never completed but abandoned. Collins's health betrayed her art; she died from breast cancer aged 46 in 1988. But 30 years on, her abandoned stories seem fresh and distinctive and, in a new age of anxiety and crisis of identity, startlingly prescient. - Colin Grant.
Kirkus Review
Published for the first time nearly 30 years after the author's death at age 46, this gorgeous and strikingly intimate short story collection focuses on the lives and loves of black Americans in the 1960s.In Exteriors, an unseen narrator directs the lighting for a disintegrating marriage like a scene from a movie set. Okay, now backlight the two of them asleep in the big double bed, says the voice. And then later: take it way down. She looks too anxious and sad. Interiors, the companion story, is a pair of reflective monologues, first the husband (Sometimes I get the feeling that when Im dead happiness is gonna rise up out of your soul and wreck havoc on life), and then the wife (the first time my husband left me, I took a small cabin in the woods, to enjoy a benevolent solitude). The title story, wrenching and darkly hilarious, follows a circle of young interracial lovers through 1963, the year of race-creed-color blindness. In The Happy Family, the familys friend recounts the quiet tragedy of their slow unraveling; When Love Withers All of Life Cries documents the emotional landscape of a romance. A pioneering African-American playwright, filmmaker, and activist best known for her 1982 feature film Losing Ground, Collins has a spectacular sense of dialogue. These are stories where nothing happens and everything happens, stories that are at once sweeping and very, very small. Though most of the pieces span only a few pages, they are frequently overwhelmingly richnot just in their sharp takes on sex, race, and relationships, but in the power and music of their sentences. Collins prose is so precise and hypnotic that no amount of rereading it feels like enough. Astonishing and essential. A gem. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Collins, a pioneering black female filmmaker whose Losing Ground (1982) had its first DVD release just this year, passed away in 1988, leaving behind this collection of tales that are complete without feeling completed. The stories are set in different eras. The earlier ones take place during the 1960s civil rights movement, and the later ones bring readers to South Africa divestment protests of the 1980s. As the provocative collection title suggests, interracial love is the chief romantic theme Collins explores in stories of varying lengths and complexity, but it's not her only focus. She also examines the different types of connections formed within African American family relationships across generations. And a few stories are wholly stream-of-consciousness. Each of Collins' stories leaves the reader wanting to know more about the characters and their creator, which makes this an intriguing and bittersweet publication of these stories long awaiting the attention they deserve.--Hawkins, Valerie Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
KATHLEEN COLLINS'S SHORT STORY collection, "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?" opens with a monologue. An unnamed director is giving instructions to someone - a stagehand? a cinematographer? - on how to light a room in which two lovers are suffering the demise of their relationship. The last line is this: "Leave her in the shadow while she looks for the feelings that lit up the room." This three-page section, titled "Exteriors," can hardly be considered a story; it is more like a voyeuristic passage through which the reader can oscillate between being emotionally invested in and distant from matters of love. Collins toys with human beings as shadows, who fade in and out of one another's lives, and she carefully depicts how abandonment and attachment can be two sides of the same experience. This collection of previously unpublished short fiction is long overdue. Collins, who died of breast cancer in 1988 at the young age of 46, was a playwright, educator, activist and among the first African-American women to make a feature film, the comic drama "Losing Ground." With "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?" she weaves what seem to be autobiographical details into her fiction. In "How Does One Say," Collins makes use of her Sorbonne education and French proficiency to write about a young black girl who establishes a rapport with the professor of a French immersion program in Maine. In the title story, two activist lovers - a black woman and a white man - are struggling to reconcile their relationship with their familial obligations. The lovers met while encouraging others to vote in the South; Collins, for her part, joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped with its efforts to register voters in Georgia. Collins truly understands her characters in all of their ambivalence and complexity, and she shows how respectability politics governs many of their lives, with devastating effects. "I was the first colored woman he ever seriously considered loving," the narrator says in "Stepping Back." "The first one with class, style, poetry, taste, elegance, repartee and haute cuisine. Because, you know, a colored woman with class is still an exceptional creature." She sounds so confident, so sure of herself, yet later on she is unable to make love, because such physical intimacy would strip away all her affectations: "How could I occupy the splendid four-poster bed? Tastefully enough." A widower in another story mourns for his late wife and laments their tough history. "Nobody in that family wanted Lillie to marry me," he tells his daughter. "I was too dark, I didn't have any money and I wasn't a teacher." While racism and colorism are always present, they infuse the stories rather than dominate them, affecting how the characters judge each other and themselves. Collins focuses on black people whose esteem for one another is based on their proximity to whiteness, despite white people being kept in the background for almost the entirety of the book. There is an impressive balance of candidness and lyricism in these stories, which convey how platonic and romantic love can either sink to the depths of cruelty or soar as high as any imagination can stretch. Collins enriches this exploration by switching among different perspectives - whether it's the first person ("Documentary Style"), a conversation formatted like a script ("When Love Withers All of Life Cries"), the third-person ("Only Once") or the voices of two people reflecting on the same story ("Interiors") - suggesting that no single consciousness has a monopoly on the truth when it comes to something as dizzying as relationships. It is with these different kinds of interiority that Collins shows the vastness of emotion, making a reader aware that nothing ever stays the same, that someone can be here today and gone tomorrow and that memories of relationships past can pulsate with the same amount of force as the present. Collins was a contemporary of Alice Walker and Jamaica Kincaid, and we should make room for her in the literary canon; "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?" is evidence that this space would be much deserved. MORGAN JERKINS'S debut essay collection, "This Will Be My Undoing," will be published in 2018.
Library Journal Review
Filmmaker/playwright/writer/activist Collins was a multifaceted, multitalented pioneer who died at just 46. In 2014, indie distributor Milestone Films reintroduced her groundbreaking 1982 film, Losing Ground, one of the first movies directed by an African American woman. Beyond the celluloid, this posthumously published 16-story collection should make Collins's work accessible to all listeners. Collins confronts the disintegration of relationships in "Interiors," disconnects from communication in "How Does One Say?," pays the price of activism in "Conference: Parts I and II," and explores the barriers of race in the title story. A bonus for the audiophile, the author's daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, reads her own insightful, admiring introduction to her mother's work, which does not appear in the print edition. A versatile five-narrator cast-Cherise Boothe, Adenrele Ojo, Paula J. Parker, Desean Terry, and Dan Woren-vividly voice Collins's spare, fearless, and perceptive pieces, albeit anonymously. Producers would have done well to add a "read by" after each title to distinguish (and credit) who's who. VERDICT Producers' misstep aside, this is an exceptional, necessary acquisition for all libraries. ["With a quick but searing touch of the brush, Collins crosses racial, gender, and generational divides, and her readers will, too": LJ 9/1/16 review of the Ecco: HarperCollins hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.