Customer Reviews

Best African American Fiction: 2009

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As a whole, this collection of fiction writing is pretty good. For a black male writer who is always on the prowl for contemporary black literature, this book gave me a great overview of some of what's being written...short stories and excerpts from adult and young people's fiction (this last category is especially important because it's often easily overlooked). There are some newer names like Amina Gautier and some old reliables like Walter Dean Myers. Another positive thing is that there's NOTHING in this collection written by Zane.

The book's limitations are in its aesthetics starting with its TITLE. Some of us feel that the term "African-American" is not as inclusive as the term "black." "Black", in my opinion, encompasses the global black diaspora, and in effect, that IS what this book tries to do with stories set in the U.S. and abroad, impacted and informed by mainland U.S culture and the cultures of "the Islands", for example. I think titling the book "Best 'African-American' Fiction..." actually does the collection a disservice.

Another MAJOR beef: despite brief portraits of the editors, there is no biographical information on any of the contributing authors. For the book excerpts, neither are there editorial intros or outros to provide background for the material anthologized. Put simply, the editors provide absolutely no context for any of the material in the book. This is a major gaffe.

Yet another curiousity, and this isn't meant as a criticism, is that many of the selections, particularly the short stories, seem to revolve around the theme of interracial relationships. Maybe this yet another side effect of the ascendancy of Barack Obama.

Overall, the book IS worth having, and I've since purchased two of the books that were excerpted in this collection. In all fairness to the editors, this IS the first edition, but we'll expect them to have everything RIGHT next year.