About the Book
'Brilliant . . . These stories are sly and prescient, a nuanced reflection of the world we are living in.' Roxane Gay
Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and X-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters' lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history.
We meet Black and multi-racial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief - all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history - about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.
In 'Boys Go to Jupiter' a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate flag bikini goes viral. In 'Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain' a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend's unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a Black scholar from Washington DC is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.
About the Author :
Danielle Evans is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the PEN America PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Paterson Prize, and a National Book Foundation '5 under 35' selection. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Review :
A dazzling dissection of our twisted attitudes about race, culture, history, and truth.
Each story in this superb collection offers an observation of modern life that feels urgent and vital, and confirms Evans’ place as one of the most electric and insightful voices writing today.
There’s an elegant, barely suppressed emotional explosiveness to Danielle Evans’s sublime storytelling. . . Fear and fierceness, grief and grievance push-pull Evans’s complex, entirely convincing characters in every conceivable direction.
With the seven brilliant stories in The Office of Historical Corrections, Danielle Evans demonstrates, once again, that she is the finest short story writer working today. These stories are sly and prescient, a nuanced reflection of the world we are living in . . . wickedly smart and haunting.
Evans makes important points about race and history, but this is not to undermine the lightness of her touch . . . It is only as you reach the end that you realise the razor-sharp stories in this collection are all in dialogue, cleverly and satisfyingly upending notions of victimhood.
The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans reminds me why I love short fiction . . . Evans is blessed with perfect pitch when it comes to dialogue – both in terms of what is spoken and what goes unsaid.
Danielle Evans is a wonder . . . She writes about the stakes of contemporary life in a way that always feels so true and so right. You leave her stories feeling like you’ll miss those characters forever. She is a writer of the first order.
Evans' prose presents something of a rarity in contemporary fiction: where sure and deft craft meet real feeling. Her stories grip and amuse, cutting to the essence of what might mean to be Black in America.
Evans’s storytelling shines . . . her characters are sharp, with terrific depth, and her prose is a pleasure to read.
Blistering stories of Black lives that set the record straight . . . One of the saving graces of the last few years is the abundance of sharp fiction that deftly dramatizes racial injustice and division in this country. Evans goes further than most.
What makes a good short story? Danielle Evans' dynamite new collection proves a study in the form. Slices of life, each piece in Corrections captures its own mood, hums to distinct rhythms, and locates unique spaces for empathy and pain and catharsis. They're also delectably readable, propulsive accounts of loss and fear and redemption that twist with O. Henry-level glee.
The most astonishing thing I’ve read this fall.
The energy, humor, and intelligence, the careful examination of history and of [Evans's] characters’ internal and external states, gave me the feeling of being present at a gathering of fascinating strangers and friends, and I was saddened when the party was done.
You don’t want to miss this captivating collection of short stories by the award-winning short story extraordinaire Danielle Evans. Tales of race, loss, history and relationships culminate in the final stunning eponymous novella.
Exceptionally wise . . . Every story in The Office of Historical Collections is on point. . . but the ancestral thriller novella that spawned its title is completely transformative.
Evans . . . dives into the generational wounds from America’s violent racial past and present, and crafts her stories with a surgeon's precision. Each detail meticulously builds on the last, leading to satisfying, unforeseeable plot twists . . . Readers won’t be able to look away from the page.
One is truly never the same after reading a short story by Danielle Evans.
Evans . . . releases a hotly anticipated new story collection, exploring the subjects of race, American history and grief with her signature insight.
One of the most incisive, resonant writers working today . . . Evans brilliantly reflects and dissects contemporary crises surrounding race, identity, and America . . . It's in the titular novella, in which a Black woman living in Washington, D.C. starts investigating a historical mystery that has stakes both personal and societal, that Evans will really blow your mind, leaving you to put the pieces back together.
These scorching stories . . . take a headlong plunge into the murky waters of identity, race, and love.
The stories here feel ripped from the headlines, but each offers an insightful glimpse into the strange world we've built beneath ourselves.
Evans’s story collection offers the return of a sardonic, witty and insightful cast of protagonists who have to attend bad bridesmaids functions and gaslighting from hook-ups, doctors, and others (usually men) who underestimate them based on what they look like.
In these six assured short stories and one novella, women, mostly Black, undergo moments of trial and transition. Evans uses outré imaginative elements . . . but grounds her narratives in the familiar—family illnesses, fraught relationships with exes, complicated reckonings with race.
The author rewrites the official record by way of fiction . . . Evans’s propulsive narratives read as though they’re getting away with something, building what feel like novelistic plots onto the short story’s modest real estate. No surprise, then, that this collection concludes with its title novella, about a Black professor who quits her job to work for the city government, correcting factual mistakes in the public record. The story marries Melvillian mundanity with melodramatic suspense. I could have kept reading for pages.
This collection of short stories touches on relationships, pain, fear and love — all under the lens of race. But it’s the eponymous novella, in which a Black scholar working for a government agency faces the job of correcting the historical record, that has reviewers proclaiming brilliance.
A dazzling collection. Contemporary life in Danielle Evans's stories has a kind of incandescent and dangerous energy: even in moments of somberness or isolation, her characters crackle with heat, light, and self-awareness.
Danielle Evans is a stone-cold genius, in possession of both a merciless eye and a merciful heart. And she keeps getting better.
Evans invokes histories (and she can summon multiple in a single sentence) not to close down possibilities, but to open them up . . . The plotting is excellent, but the real joy is in the tangents.
