Publishers Weekly
01/08/2024
Cotman (Dance on Saturday) utilizes magical conceits and pop culture references to probe America’s legacy of racism in this striking collection. In “The Switchin’ Tree,” set in the 1950s, a young Black boy named Jesse walks along the highway, eliciting racial slurs from white motorists. After the boy returns home, his drunken father says he’s going to beat Jesse for wandering off, then hears a voice from a tree, and tells the tree he’s trying to protect his son from the white lynch mobs he remembers from his own childhood. “Owen,” set in the late 1990s, also deals with corporal punishment but affects a quirky vibe. In it, a Black father drives to his ex-wife’s home to punish his “weird” 11-year-old son, Teddy, after learning from his ex that Teddy shoved his younger sister for teasing him about his adoration for a white pro wrestler who’d recently died in the ring. In the title story, the narrator chafes at his girlfriend’s confession that she decided to date him because he reminds her of Malik, a Black cast member of the Real World (“I know I have an afro, but I’m not some hippie”). The distinctive and troubled characters make these stories stand out. Cotman’s versatile talents are on full display. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
An exceptional work of magical realism...spectacular, full of energy and intelligence. [Weird Black Girls] features notes of Jesmyn Ward's musicality, shares Percival Everett's wit and flair for metaphor and calls to mind Gayl Jones' fierce sense for the fantastic.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“In each of the seven stories in this collection, characters pursue their obsessions on paths to glory and destruction while around them their worlds twist and warp, oscillating between reality and impossibility.”—Gizmodo
"Splendidly strange...the stories are gleefully genre-busting...yet their invention is always grounded in the tangible struggles the characters face...an epiphany about our shared American reality that is all the more startling for its brutal familiarity...a must-read."—Kirkus, starred review
"An astounding collection from a rare talent.”—Booklist, starred review
"[Cotman] utilizes magical conceits and pop culture references to probe America’s legacy of racism in this striking collection...The distinctive and troubled characters make these stories stand out. Cotman’s versatile talents are on full display." —Publishers Weekly
“Homeboy can write. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. And not afraid to nerd out either. With Weird Black Girls, Cotman stellarly bursts open the thread of Black space in fiction. A landmark collection!” —Sidik Fofana, author of Stories From the Tenants Downstairs
“Elwin Cotman is a brilliant writer, full stop, and Weird Black Girls is his best book yet. Essential reading.” —Elizabeth Hand, author of A Haunting on the Hill and Generation Loss
"Elwin Cotman's fiction is genius. Weird Black Girls is full of wry, fantastical twists that are always surprising, always illuminating. I'm enraptured by his writing, his every paragraph rich in wisdom and wit, his stories somehow rough and refined both, a brilliant mix of perversity and common sense, of the sacred and the profane."—Timothy Schaffert, author of The Swan Gondola
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-02-03
Seven long short stories that call into being worlds as fantastic as they are real.
As presaged by the title, the stories in Cotman’s fourth collection are splendidly strange. In “Weird Black Girls,” the narrator takes his ex-girlfriend on a trip to Boston, a tourist attraction ever since “the Rupture” in 1702 when “the settlement...rose like a finger pointing skyward to fix at a 45-degree angle above the earth,” an event supposedly caused by a Black witch named Annalee who may still roam Cambridge’s uncanny, and racist, streets. In “Things I Never Learned in Caitlin Clarke’s Intro to Acting Class,” the narrator takes a new lover, Leroy, only to discover that whenever they touch he’s transported back in time to inhabit Leroy’s body as he attends an acting class led by the real-life star of Dragonslayer. In “Tournament Arc,” two life-long best friends forced out of their jobs by Covid-19 and culture wars capitalize on their shared obsession for all things anime to run a LARP tournament that attracts a spectacular cast of combatants, most notably a sentient suit of “armor from precolonial Benin.” The stories are gleefully genre-busting in the style of Rion Amilcar Scott or Karen Joy Fowler, yet their invention is always grounded in the tangible struggles the characters face as they define their gender identities, their racial allegiances, and their right to be ordinary in a world that is realistically cruel. In the harrowing “Triggered,” for example, a story that’s markedly realist for this fabulist collection, the toxic relationship between two white Bay Area Occupy–affiliated activists unravels to reveal the depths of the destruction their performative allyship wreaks on the Black and brown communities they themselves have occupied. A reader, acclimated to the exuberant oddity that characterizes the majority of the stories, may find themselves waiting for the surrealist shoe to drop. When it does not and the story grinds to the habitual tragedy of its conclusion, the result is an epiphany about our shared American reality that is all the more startling for its brutal familiarity.
Sharp, poignant, funny, and, above all, filled with the joy of invention—a must-read.
