From a National Book Award finalist, Witness is an elegant, insistent narrative of actions taken and not taken.
What does it mean to take action? To bear witness? What does it cost?
In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters—from children to grandmothers to ghosts—live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect, to remember, to stand up for, and to really see each other, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape not only their own futures but the legacies and prospects of their families and their city.
In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations, where strangers might sometimes show kindness while those we trust—doctors, employers, siblings—too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill, dancing in the street, glimpsing your purpose, change on the horizon.
With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city.
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ADVANCE PRAISE:
“Jamel Brinkley is one of the best story writers we have. Witness is a book of psychological acuity, of graceful sentences, of devastation and heart. Read everything this man writes, and know the world anew.”
—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
“Jamel Brinkley reminds one of iconic short-story writers Edward P. Jones and Mavis Gallant. His characters, full of mysteries and secrets, do not strive to be something larger than life, nor do they allow themselves to be reduced into categorizable and explicable figures. Each story in Witness brings a novel’s worth of richness and complexity. This is a dazzling collection by a masterful storyteller.”
—Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose
“In Witness, Jamel Brinkley explores the longings and fears of his characters with a tenderness and generosity of spirit that makes the reader hurt when they hurt, and rejoice in life’s surprising moments of joy alongside them. He renders worlds both familiar and new with precision and clarity, showing the many ways that place has the power to mark people, whether they be young boys, old men or the people society pushes to its margins. Read Witness and allow yourself the pleasure of seeing the world as Brinkley sees it.”
—Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House
“Brinkley’s sentences are daggers. He writes about the shifting intimacies of community and love with wit and warmth.”
—Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“We call up the names of short story greats to describe Jamel Brinkley's writing, but his stories are lucidly and assuredly his own. His seemingly effortless style is recognizable within a paragraph. His evocation of character and place is second-to-none. There is all the involvedness and complexity of a novel in each story, which makes this collection so abundant and wise. A brilliant writer.”
—Caoilinn Hughes, author of The Wild Laughter
“These are stories of rare beauty and insight, that glitter with humor and hurt, written with lambent clarity and tenderness about family and marriage, love and brokenness. Brinkley has the same sure and affecting understanding of purpose and loss, of human temporality--our meanings in and out of time--that Edward P. Jones does, the close, compelling texture and wisdom of Mavis Gallant, and an honoring of and commitment to mystery that is his own.”
—David Hayden, author of Darker With the Lights On
"Short stories that in their depth of feeling, perception, and sense of place affirm their author's bright promise . . . [They] carry a rich veneer worthy of such exemplars of the form as Chekhov, Eudora Welty, Alice Munro, and James Alan McPherson . . . After just two collections, Brinkley may already be a grand master of the short story.”
“In his dazzling sophomore collection, Brinkley digs into the promises and dangers of intimacy and the costs of speaking up or staying silent . . . Throughout, Brinkley crafts unforgettable portraits, humming with barely restrained tension, of Black men and women exploring what it means to be part of families and communities that are awash in hope and disappointment alike. These intimate vignettes have the power to move readers.”
