Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?: Stories

by Kathleen Collins Narrated by Nina Lorez Collins, Cherise Boothe, Adenrele Ojo, Paula J. Parker, Desean Terry, Dan Woren

Overview

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.

This collection of short stories by Kathleen Collins 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.

It's a timely addition to the literary canon, exploring deep, far-reaching issues of race, gender, family, and sexuality that shape the ordinary moments in our lives.

HarperCollins 2024

Editorial Reviews

JANUARY 2017 - AudioFile

It’s easy to find oneself comparing an audiobook performance to a musical one, and Collins's posthumously published collection of short stories lends itself to that tendency. Each is a glimpse into the twentieth-century African-American experience. Introduced beautifully in a fascinating foreword by Elizabeth Alexander, the stories have their own enthralling verses, refrains, and choruses. Each narrator embraces the text with his or her unique rhythm and beat, whether crooning through the nuances of characters' burgeoning relationships or slicing along the jagged edges of other characters' breakups and disappointments. The overall effect is interesting and engrossing, with the variety of excellent narrators enhancing the written word. The audio performances are as clear-eyed and thoughtful as the prose itself. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/19/2016
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.)

Elle

Make[s] you ache with the powerfully felt sense of real people who value racial parity and collaboration, the aims of art and the necessity of commerce, fearless conversation and creative isolation…Sensuous and immediate, the 16 slim, elliptical stories are built upon elegantly captured moments…hum[s] with far-seeing energy.

Booklist

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.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

It is a delightful literary discovery that the creator of the landmark film, ‘Losing Ground,’ also turned her hand to fiction. The stories collected here are witty and revealing, and together constitute an unearthed gem of black women’s fiction.

Vivian Gornick

This book is one of the most eloquent statements I have read of what it was like to be black and young and alive in the 1960s. I applaud its publication.

Margo Jefferson

How well she understands mixed motives, emotions and bloodlines. Histories and legacies at cross-purposes. Elective and compulsive affinities, both intellectual and erotic. How unlucky we were to lose her. And how lucky we are to have these stories.

Daphne Merkin

Kathleen Collins writes with an immediacy and vividness that is exhilarating to read. She inhabits a landscape that sidesteps political or sexual correctness in favor of emotional truth-telling...Throughout it all there is a brio that is contagious.

Danzy Senna

In this slim, devastating collection, Kathleen Collins writes of interracial America like no one before or since. This is a daringly complex vision of both blackness and whiteness by a writer who was utterly ahead of her time.

Bliss Broyard

[A] lost treasure... this jewel of a book illuminates big timeless themes of familial ties and self-determination, group affinity and individualism, lovers and the power plays between them in a way that feels completely new.”.

Katie Roiphe

These stories offer a sharp, clear, unsentimental vision of race in the sixties, the mingling of politics and desire, the search for place that will be both exotic and familiar to modern readers, richly historical and utterly recognizable.

Zadie Smith

From the first page you know you’re in the hands of an exceptional writer... Collins’ stories are passionate and light-footed, angry but also delicate - they move like quicksilver... She’s deliciously funny. She speaks of the many-sided lives of black women with care and intelligence. I adored this book.

Margot Jefferson

How well she understands mixed motives, emotions and bloodlines. Histories and legacies at cross-purposes. Elective and compulsive affinities, both intellectual and erotic. How unlucky we were to lose her. And how lucky we are to have these stories.

Library Journal

09/01/2016
A groundbreaking African American filmmaker and playwright, Collins died in 1988 at age 46, and this previously unpublished collection of her stories will have many readers wishing they'd seen her work before. Offered here are acute and lucidly rendered narratives spanning the civil rights era, often illustrating personal fallout. In the masterly title story, a young woman ("the only 'Negro' in her graduating class") contemplates marrying her white lover but senses her father's displeasure at this "indecent commingling." Elsewhere, a daughter who lets her hair frizz shocks her father by looking "just like any other colored girl," and a young woman devastated by the collapse of an adored uncle finally realizes that he proudly "refused to overcome his sorrow"—forced on him by society owing to the "blunt humiliation of his skin." VERDICT With a quick but searing touch of the brush, Collins crosses racial, gender, and generational divides, and her readers will, too.

JANUARY 2017 - AudioFile

It’s easy to find oneself comparing an audiobook performance to a musical one, and Collins's posthumously published collection of short stories lends itself to that tendency. Each is a glimpse into the twentieth-century African-American experience. Introduced beautifully in a fascinating foreword by Elizabeth Alexander, the stories have their own enthralling verses, refrains, and choruses. Each narrator embraces the text with his or her unique rhythm and beat, whether crooning through the nuances of characters' burgeoning relationships or slicing along the jagged edges of other characters' breakups and disappointments. The overall effect is interesting and engrossing, with the variety of excellent narrators enhancing the written word. The audio performances are as clear-eyed and thoughtful as the prose itself. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2016-09-26
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 I’m 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 family’s 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 rich—not 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173845238
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	12/06/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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