Showing results by narrator "Je Nie Fleming" in All Categories

A lush, glittering short story collection exploring female obsession and desire by an award-winning author Roxane Gay calls "a consummate storyteller." From Kentucky to the California desert, these 42 short stories - ranging from the '80s and '90s to present day - expose the hearts of girls and women in moments of obsessive desire and fantasy, wildness and bad behavior, brokenness and fearlessness, and more.

While struggling with infertility, Candy and Frankie, a mixed-race couple living in Chicago, decide to adopt a black child. Despite objections from their wildly different families, who beg the couple to go the more "traditional route", Candy and Frankie schedule an appointment with the Department of Child Family Services in the hopes of finding not an infant, but a toddler - a child "no one else wants".

Jada Jackson is the most average of teenage girls. She, like the other girls, has never considered any option other than to attend the local, completely average high school. When the mysterious Miss Genevieve informs Jada that she has been invited to enroll in a seemingly prestigious, yet curious, school for young ladies, Jada hardly hesitates to accept the offer. But on her very first day, Jada learns that Miss Genevieve's promises are more fraught than they initially seemed.

Danielle Williams, skydiver and founder of the online community Melanin Base Camp, profiles dozens of adventurers pushing the boundaries of inclusion and equity in the outdoors. These compelling narratives include a mother whose love of hiking led her to found a nonprofit to expose BIPOC children to the wonders of the outdoors and a mountain biker who, despite at first dealing with unwelcome glances and hostility on trails, went on to become a blogger who writes about justice and diversity in natural spaces.

In an age of reality TV, a husband and wife cling to Victorian notions of privacy, though doing so threatens the life of the wife. Their daughter, Anna, yearns for her mother’s unguarded affection, and eventually learns there is value in restraint. But Anna, a Caribbean American immigrant, finds that lesson harder to accept when, eager to assimilate in her new country, she discovers that a gap yawns between her and American-born citizens.