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Stories
by Ladee Hubbard
The critically acclaimed author of The Rib King returns with an eagerly anticipated collection of interlocking short stories including the title story written exclusively for this volume, that explore relationships between friends, family and strangers in a Black neighborhood over fifteen years.
The twelve gripping tales in The Last Suspicious Holdout, the new story collection by award-winning author Ladee Hubbard, deftly chronicle poignant moments in the lives of an African American community located in a "sliver of southern suburbia." Spanning from 1992 to 2007, the stories represent a period during which the Black middle-class expanded while stories of "welfare Queens," "crack babies," and "super predators" abounded in the media. In "False Cognates," a formerly incarcerated attorney struggles with raising the tuition to keep his troubled son in an elite private school. In "There He Go," a young girl whose mother moves constantly clings to a picture of the grandfather she doesn't know but invents stories of his greatness. Characters spotlighted in one story reappear in another, providing a stunning testament to the enduring resilience of Black people as they navigate the "post-racial" period The Last Suspicious Holdout so vividly portrays.
"Hubbard's sweeping linked collection follows a Southern Black community through decades of inequities and unrest...Hubbard delves intriguingly into...complex feelings...blending rich dialogue and various points of view...[her] engaging chorus of voices and well-drawn cast make this resonate." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Nothing seems lost or shortchanged in presenting this panorama of Black lives, whether disparities in social class, creeping gentrification, or the arduous, at times heroic efforts of even the poorest community residents to retain grace, decorum, and some autonomy over their surroundings. Hubbard's eyes and ears are in superb working order as she tells this besieged community's life story." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"I loved these interconnected stories. They are fiercely intelligent, warm in their own way, and absolutely absorbing. Hubbard has a deft sense of character and community and I really enjoyed piecing together the connections between the collection's characters. Excellent excellent excellent."- Roxane Gay
"Keenly observed, both in exterior details and interior psychological realities, Ladee Hubbard's short stories capture the absurd, charming, brave, beautiful, and grotesque acts that are the pivot points of specific Black lives. With prose bone spare and elegant, she reveals the swagger required to keep seeing and to be seen." - Alice Randall, author of Black Bottom Saints
This information about The Last Suspicious Holdout was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ladee Hubbard is the author of The Talented Ribkins, which received the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, the Times Literary Supplement, Copper Nickel, and Callaloo. She received a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award as well as fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Art Omi, the Sacatar Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Born in Massachusetts and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida, she currently lives in New Orleans with her husband and three children.
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