Notes from a black woman's diary : selected works of Kathleen Collins

Title:

Uniform Title:

Works. Selections

Author:

Collins, Kathleen, 1942-1988, author.

Personal Author:

Collins, Kathleen, 1942-1988, author.

ISBN:

9780062800954

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

xi, 448 pages : 1 illustration ; 21 cm

Contents:

Foreword / Stories. "Scapegoat child" ; "Nina Simone" ; "Raschida" -- Novel excerpt. "Lollie" Notes from a black woman's diary -- Letters -- Plays. The brothers : a tragedy in three acts ; Remembrance : a play in one act ; The reading : a play in one act ; Begin the beguine : a play in one act ; The healing : a play in one act -- Screenplays. A summer diary ; Losing ground.

Abstract:

"A stunning collection of fiction, diary entries, screenplays and scripts by the brilliant African-American artist and filmmaker"-- Provided by publisher.

Subject Term:

African Americans -- Fiction.

Genre:

Personal correspondence.

Summary:

"A stunning collection of fiction, diary entries, screenplays and scripts by the brilliant African-American artist and filmmaker"--

Holds:

Available:*

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Summary

A RECOMMENDED BOOK OF 2019 FROM

Vanity Fair * Vogue * The Huffington Post

A stunning collection of fiction, diary entries, screenplays, and scripts by the brilliant African-American artist and filmmaker

Relatively unknown during her life, the artist, filmmaker, and writer Kathleen Collins emerged on the literary scene in 2016 with the posthumous publication of the short story collection Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Said Zadie Smith, "To be this good and yet to be ignored is shameful, but her rediscovery is a great piece of luck for us."

That rediscovery continues in Notes from a Black Woman's Diary, which spans genres to reveal the breadth and depth of the late author's talent. The compilation is anchored by more of Collins's short stories, which, striking and powerful in their brevity, reveal the ways in which relationships are both formed and come undone. Also collected here is the work Collins wrote for the screen and stage: the screenplay of her film Losing Ground, in which a professor discovers that the student film she's agreed to act in has uncomfortable parallels to her own life; and the script for The Brothers, a play about the potent effects of sexism and racism on a midcentury middle-class black family. And finally, it is in Collins's raw and prescient diaries that her nascent ideas about race, gender, marriage, and motherhood first play out on the page.

Kathleen Collins's writing brings to life vibrant characters whose quotidian concerns powerfully illuminate the particular joys, challenges, and heartbreaks rendered by the African-American experience. By turns empowering, exuberant, sexy, and poignant, Notes from a Black Woman's Diary is a brilliant compendium of an inimitable talent, and a rich portrait of a writer hard at work.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

A multigenre collection of Collins' (Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, 2016) previously unpublished writingfiction, letters, diary entries, plays, and screenplayscollected here and edited by her daughter, 30 years after the author's death."The greatest marvel of Collins's writing is that she is a magician in her use of interiority," writes Danielle Evans (Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, 2010) in the collection's introduction. "She can just slip underneath a moment of tension barely noticed by those in the world of the story and give us a character's entire interior life, but she is also a master of the moments whenall pretense drops away and the unsayable is given words and said out loud." It is, as the works here quickly demonstrate, a mastery that transcends form. The book opens with a trio of short stories, each of them centered around a woman as she is observed, followed by an excerpt from an unfinished novel, Lollie: A Suburban Tale, in which a bohemian husband and wife fight for narrative control of their marriage. It's a fight that ends prematurely; the immediate tragedy is the excerpt cuts off. The fragments from Collins' actual lifefirst the diary entries and then the lettersare as arrestingly clear as the fiction, small and expansive at once. Dated Sept. 9: "They're selling an old medieval house on Mason's Road, where the rooms go on endlessly, like a labyrinth. We went there on Saturday and bought five red chairs for the kitchen." And reflecting on life on an April 11: "Instead of dealing with race I went in search of loveand what I found was a very hungry colored lady." The bulk of the work here, though, are the scripts, one for her 1982 feature film, Losing Grounda "comedy drama" about a philosophy professor who finds herself starring in a student film that hews unsettlingly close to her real lifeand one for the stage play The Brothers, the story of a striving middle-class black family, told by its grieving women.Reading Collins work the same themes over again and again across mediums is a rare pleasureas close as most of us will ever come to her spectacular mind. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.