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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Aug 2022, 224 pages
Paperback:
Aug 2023, 224 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Rebecca Foster
Buy This Book
Set in a Harlem high rise, a stunning debut about a tight-knit cast of characters grappling with their own personal challenges while the forces of gentrification threaten to upend life as they know it.
Like Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place and Lin Manuel Miranda's In the Heights, Sidik Fofana's electrifying collection of eight interconnected stories showcases the strengths, struggles, and hopes of one residential community in a powerful storytelling experience.
Each short story follows a tenant in the Banneker Homes, a low-income high rise in Harlem where gentrification weighs on everyone's mind. There is Swan in apartment 6B, whose excitement about his friend's release from prison jeopardizes the life he's been trying to lead. Mimi, in apartment 14D, who hustles to raise the child she had with Swan, waitressing at Roscoe's and doing hair on the side. And Quanneisha B. Miles, a former gymnast with a good education who wishes she could leave Banneker for good, but can't seem to escape the building's gravitational pull. We root for these characters and more as they weave in and out of each other's lives, endeavoring to escape from their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love.
Stories from the Tenants Downstairs brilliantly captures the joy and pain of the human experience and heralds the arrival of a uniquely talented writer.
An excerpt is available at electricliterature.com.
Though the lives of these tenants are filled with difficulties — unemployment, dead or absent parents, three people living in a one-bedroom apartment, no tangible prospects for the future — they are not miserable. Their optimism and sheer joy shine through in their picaresque antics. Lively language; feisty characters that might remind you of your own relatives, former classmates, or neighbors; sharp, varied plots; and timely themes: this was a pure pleasure to read. It's a stellar debut from a very talented writer. Fofana should win all the prizes...continued
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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Ben Fountain, author of Beautiful Country Burn Again
Every once in a while a new writer comes along and refreshes our notions of what fiction can do. Sidik Fofana is one of those rare and wonderful writers, and what he does with these stories, and with our beautiful, bottomless American language, is nothing short of revelatory. Buy this book, and prepare to be blasted by the brilliance inside. Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Sidik Fofana's timely collection is full of tenderness and truth. With it, he has given us a beautiful blueprint for the gentrification story: let it be bold, let it honor the complexities of those who are struggling to hold on. These stories are at once intimate and familiar, and utterly original. I braced myself, I laughed, and I shuddered. The voices of the residents of Banneker Terrace linger and echo long after the last page. A tremendous debut! Lorrie Moore, author of Bark
Sidik Fofana's Stories from the Tenants Downstairs is the book I've been waiting for ever since reading the first few of Mr. Fofana's stories eight years ago. I had never read anything quite like them. They have brilliant architecture that can go unnoticed beneath the carefully textured voices...Mr. Fofana has an acute ear and a perfect eye, and he doesn't rush. This is important American art.
In Sidik Fofana's Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, gentrification and rent rises pose a threat to the struggling characters living in an apartment building in Harlem. New York City and some neighboring suburban counties operate rent control and/or rent stabilization policies.
Rent control is rare, only applying to about 16,000 residential properties that were constructed before 1947 and have been occupied since 1971. These are remnants of a mid-20th-century drive to ensure affordable housing for the working class in American cities, spearheaded by NYC after the end of relevant federal regulations. The maximum base rent is adjusted every two years to take operating costs into account but cannot be raised beyond that amount. Tenants ...
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