Short stories by Jamel Brinkley
Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories. His work has also received support from Kimbilio Fiction, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Lannan Foundation. He was the 2016-2017 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and has been awarded a 2021 O. Henry Prize. Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Listing 4 stories.
After a Brooklyn man is released from prison for vehicular homicide, he attempts to care for the son and girlfriend of his best friend who died in a fire years ago.
A poor, 9-year-old, Black boy travels with a church camp to visit a house in a wealthy, white neighborhood with a pool to play in and lots of food. When the group's usual host is out of town and the van takes them to a Black woman's house instead, the boy begins to learn lessons about race and class that he does not yet fully understand.
Two male college students go to a party to look for a simple hook up, but the two women they find offer them much more.
A young black man just out of graduate school narrates the story of his sister's unhappy marriage, their cramped living arrangement in Brooklyn, and the toll it takes on her health and sanity.