Riverdale Avenue Books Publishes Award-Winning Debut Short
Story Collection
Blue Talk and Love
by
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
“Blue Talk and Love’s voice, despite
material that seems frankly
contemporary,
is paradoxically lyrical, nearly Faulknerian." --Rick Moody, judge for the American Short
Fiction Short Story Contest
Riverdale, NY – March 20, 2015 –
Innovative hybrid publisher Riverdale
Avenue Books announces the publication of the award-wining short story
collection Blue Talk and Love by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan in its Magnus
imprint. The collection has already received praise from Rick Moody, Cheryl
Clarke, Samuel R. Delany, Darryl Pinckney, LaShonda Katrice Barnett and Jewelle
Gomez.
Blue
Talk and Love tells
the stories of girls and women of color navigating the moods and mazes of urban
daily life. Set in various enclaves of New York City — including the
middle-class Hamilton Heights section of Harlem, the black queer social world of
the West Village, the Spanish-speaking borderland between Harlem and Washington
Heights, and historic Tin Pan Alley — the collection uses magic realism,
historical fiction, satire and more to highlight young black women's inner
lives.
The storylines range widely: a big-bodied
teenage girl from Harlem discovers her sexuality in the midst of racial
tensions at her Upper East Side school; four young women from Newark, New
Jersey, are charged with assaulting the man who threatens to rape them; a pair
of conjoined black female twins born into slavery, make their fame as stage
performers in the Big City. In each story, the characters push past what
is expected of them, learning to celebrate their voices and their lives.
Praise
for Blue Talk and Love
“Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is a sharp social
observer as well as a bold experimentalist. She has an arresting ear and a
courageous heart. Her language races with her intelligence and humanity.”
---Darryl Pinckney, author of High Cotton and Out There:
Mavericks of Black Fiction
"Sullivan’s prose shocks,
intrigues, and transports us through fourteen artful and unique stories.
And so do her rich and inimitable characters, most of them young black women
struggling in a world they did not make but one they must confront, tear down,
and remake. Black girls matter and Sullivan shows us just how much."
--
Cheryl Clarke, author of Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black
Women and Living as a Lesbian
"Mecca
Jamilah Sullivan's debut collection of fiction dazzles with images, language
and heart. She slips inside her characters and renders their inner lives
with painterly precision so with each story we enter a complete world drawn
with brilliant color and raw emotion. Yet it is the mystery of life
itself which she evokes so strongly and that holds us fast."
-- Jewelle Gomez,
author The Gilda Stories
"In a prose as rich and sumptuous as brocade, these stories hit
with the
the force of primal myths. They can be tender, they can be funny,
and
they can shock. This is a book that grabs you low on the spinal
column and rattles your teeth together. Sullivan is a powerful and
impressive
writer."
--Samuel R. Delany, author of Through the Valley of the Nest of
Spiders
“Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s debut story collection is a remarkable work best
described as elegiac blues… Blue Talk and Love stuns with subtle
imagery, powerful linguistic energy, and chiseled, innovative control.”–LaShonda Katrice Barnett, author of Jam on the Vine
About the Author
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is
Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. Born and raised in Harlem, New York, she received the Charles
Johnson Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, and honors
from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, and the Center
for Fiction in New York City. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Best
New Writing, American Fiction, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Feminist
Studies, and elsewhere, and she is Associate Editor for Arts & Culture
at The Feminist Wire.
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