![]() The real heads, of course, as this brilliant collection of word paintings displays, can be on anybody’s bodies. Thompson-Spires, thankfully, depicts a wide range of people, not seeking either overwhelmingly positive or negative images of a race but capturing diversity - reality - in much of its multifarious beauty and terror. Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s Heads of Colored People is a collection of short stories that each deal, in some way, with what it means to be white privilege-adjacent as an upper. ![]() ![]() Not all of Thompson-Spires’s stories are overtly satirical, and they become progressively more serious as the collection progresses, but a thread of outrageous, glaring self-awareness runs through the collection, granting even many of the more severe tales a tone of dark comedy. Thompson-Spires’s metafictional satires, oriented around questions of blackness, join a particular tradition of African-American fiction, recalling the sardonic absurdism of Everett’s Erasure and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, among others. Clever, cruel, hilarious, heartbreaking, and at times simply ingenious, Thompson-Spires’s experimental collection poses a simple, yet obviously not-simple, question: what does it mean to be a black American in this day and age?. ![]()
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