Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

Starred review from September 19, 2016
Race, gender, love, and sexuality are portrayed beautifully and humanely in this previously unpublished collection of stories from groundbreaking African-American filmmaker and civil rights activist Collins, who died in 1988 at the age of 46. Drawing on Collins’s career as a filmmaker and playwright, the stories incorporate stage directions, dramatic monologues, and camera-eye perspectives that frame the racial tension of the 1960s with both frankness and tenderness. “Exteriors” details a failing relationship from the outside, set up as a film scene through a lighting designer’s eye, while “Interiors” gives us the inner monologues from the perspectives of the couple in a failed marriage. The title story follows a group of interracial couples as each member explores his/her own identity while trying to fit in with the identity of the other. In the gripping “Only Once,” a woman recalls her thrill-seeking lover and his final act of recklessness. “The Happy Family” seems happy on the surface, but a closer look by the family’s friend reveals the cracks that broke the family apart. Full of candor, humor, and poise, this collection, so long undiscovered, will finally find the readers it deserves.

Starred review from October 15, 2016
Published for the first time nearly 30 years after the author's death at age 46, this gorgeous and strikingly intimate short story collection focuses on the lives and loves of black Americans in the 1960s.In "Exteriors," an unseen narrator directs the lighting for a disintegrating marriage like a scene from a movie set. "Okay, now backlight the two of them asleep in the big double bed," says the voice. And then later: "take it way down. She looks too anxious and sad." "Interiors," the companion story, is a pair of reflective monologues, first the husband ("Sometimes I get the feeling that when I'm dead happiness is gonna rise up out of your soul and wreck havoc on life"), and then the wife ("the first time my husband left me, I took a small cabin in the woods, to enjoy a benevolent solitude"). The title story, wrenching and darkly hilarious, follows a circle of young interracial lovers through 1963, "the year of race-creed-color blindness." In "The Happy Family," the family's friend recounts the quiet tragedy of their slow unraveling; "When Love Withers All of Life Cries" documents the emotional landscape of a romance. A pioneering African-American playwright, filmmaker, and activist best known for her 1982 feature film Losing Ground, Collins has a spectacular sense of dialogue. These are stories where nothing happens and everything happens, stories that are at once sweeping and very, very small. Though most of the pieces span only a few pages, they are frequently overwhelmingly rich--not just in their sharp takes on sex, race, and relationships, but in the power and music of their sentences. Collins' prose is so precise and hypnotic that no amount of rereading it feels like enough. Astonishing and essential. A gem.

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September 1, 2016

A groundbreaking African American filmmaker and playwright, Collins died in 1988 at age 46, and this previously unpublished collection of her stories will have many readers wishing they'd seen her work before. Offered here are acute and lucidly rendered narratives spanning the civil rights era, often illustrating personal fallout. In the masterly title story, a young woman ("the only 'Negro' in her graduating class") contemplates marrying her white lover but senses her father's displeasure at this "indecent commingling." Elsewhere, a daughter who lets her hair frizz shocks her father by looking "just like any other colored girl," and a young woman devastated by the collapse of an adored uncle finally realizes that he proudly "refused to overcome his sorrow"--forced on him by society owing to the "blunt humiliation of his skin." VERDICT With a quick but searing touch of the brush, Collins crosses racial, gender, and generational divides, and her readers will, too.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2016
Collins, a pioneering black female filmmaker whose Losing Ground (1982) had its first DVD release just this year, passed away in 1988, leaving behind this collection of tales that are complete without feeling completed. The stories are set in different eras. The earlier ones take place during the 1960s civil rights movement, and the later ones bring readers to South Africa divestment protests of the 1980s. As the provocative collection title suggests, interracial love is the chief romantic theme Collins explores in stories of varying lengths and complexity, but it's not her only focus. She also examines the different types of connections formed within African American family relationships across generations. And a few stories are wholly stream-of-consciousness. Each of Collins' stories leaves the reader wanting to know more about the characters and their creator, which makes this an intriguing and bittersweet publication of these stories long awaiting the attention they deserve.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)