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Your next favorite book
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by T Clark
A piercing short story collection that explores the feverish hunger and dizzying pleasure of girlhood and queer coming-of-age in a small town, from an acclaimed emerging writer.
Set mostly in and around a small working class neighborhood, Clark explores the lives of young Black girls, women, and nonbinary characters, slicing through the filmy veil between adolescence and adulthood; between who they've been, and who they might become.
D'asia's friendship with a school security guard is teetering close to inappropriate. Chrissy is looking to play roulette on a trip with her boyfriend but ends up in a hotel room with two strangers. Juju's mother dresses her up for a meeting with a local music producer. A little sister cringes as a friend tries to hook up with her older brother. A fight breaks out at a party and the video goes viral. A woman can't stop walking by her ex's window, hoping to catch a glimpse of all she lost.
With sharp sentences and great affection, Clark excavates the push and pull of desire and power running beneath tender and bare moments.
"Clark's work is lush, complex, a little bit sexy...Everything you'd want from fiction concerned with the humanness and paradox of being alive."—Dantiel W. Moniz, author of Milk Blood Heat
"All This Want (and I Can't Get None) is an ode to Black girlhood in all its forms, each story its own messy, hilarious, profound illustration of desire, friendship, the masks we put on, and the ways we learn to love. T Clark has written a short story collection for the ages: sharp, layered, and abundant with characters so easy to know and love it feels impossible that the next narrator can be equally charming, complex, and inspired; and yet, Clark delivers story after story of yearning girls and women and their relentlessly relatable worlds, expertly ushering us into each story only to long for them as soon as they're over." —Leila Mottley, author of The Girls Who Grew Big
"Smart, thoughtful, and so goddamn funny, T Clark's All This Want (and I Can't Get None) is a treasure trove of a collection. Looking into these stories felt akin to pressing your eye against the viewsight of a kaleidoscope: every turn of the page brought some fresh new delight. What a stunner." —Kristen N. Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things
This information about All This Want (and I Can't Get None) 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.
T Clark is from Westchester County, New York. They received BAs in sociology and English from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, and an MFA in fiction from Indiana University in Bloomington. They were the recipient of a "Writer in the World" fellowship in Nepal, a Ross Lockridge Jr. Award in Fiction, a Newport News Public Library short story award, and a Mitchell Adelmann award in Fiction. They have received support and fellowships from the Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, NY, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Lambda Literary Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and The Vermont Studio Center. Their fiction has appeared in Joyland, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, The Offing, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. They teach and write in New Orleans.
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