Neighbors and Other Stories

Starred review from October 23, 2023
This extraordinary posthumous debut collection from Oliver (1943–1966) astutely portrays the realities of African American life in the South during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras. The author was born in North Carolina and enrolled in the University of Iowa’s MFA program, and though she was only 22 when she died in a motorcycle accident, she managed to publish four of these 14 stories in her lifetime. The title entry offers a complex view of a family on the eve of a boy’s first day as the only Black student at his newly integrated elementary school, as an onslaught of threatening letters gradually erodes his parents’ resolve to send him. In “The Closet on the Top Floor,” Oliver adds a surreal element to the theme of desegregation, as a Black college student whose parents advocated for her school to integrate begins to withdraw from her classmates and eventually spends much of her time in a closet. “Health Service,” “Traffic Jam,” and “Spiders Without Tears” delve into familial ties, romance, and interracial relationships, respectively. The author’s heartfelt and resplendent writing is loaded with an earthy complexity reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston—indeed, novelist Tayari Jones names Oliver along with Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ann Petry as “literary foremothers” in her introduction. Oliver’s brilliant stories belong in the American canon.

December 1, 2023

DEBUT With an introduction by Tayari Jones, O. Henry Award winner Oliver is being brought to readers' attention after decades of obscurity. In the mid-1960s, Oliver, who was just beginning her twenties and a promising writing career, died in a motorcycle crash. This first full story collection reveals her to be an adventurous writer who deftly captured the pervasive daily pressures of living while Black in the midst of white-dominant society. Readers will feel the constant pressures and lack of room to navigate freely in a racist world; seemingly simple scenarios--opening a door, walking down a road, going to school--are fraught with potential for physical violence or emotional violation. The stories read like tightly wrought suspense with an edge toward horror, and Oliver uses wide-ranging forms to create riveting effects. For example, in "Frozen Voices," she uses repeating refrains and textual punches to tell the fractured story of a tragic love triangle, creating a disorientation and anxiety that underscore the theme of entangled relationships further complicated by outside forces. VERDICT Oliver uses subtlety and nuance like a knife. These stories reveal a writer who was willing to explore and stretch, telling honest, bared-open stories of her time and now of ours.--Laura Florence

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2023
A remarkable collection of Jim Crow-era stories from a major talent. If Oliver's name isn't well known now, there's a reason: She died at 22 in 1966, leaving only four published stories in her wake. Two more stories were published posthumously, but Oliver's career, for all intents and purposes, ended before it had a chance to begin. A new collection of Oliver's published and unpublished work testifies both to her immense raw talent as a young writer and to the major figure she might have become if she'd had the chance to develop. Her stories deal with the everyday lives of Black families of all classes as they contend with issues such as segregation, poverty, and prejudice and their own hopes for the future. In the title story, a family prepares itself, emotionally as well as physically, for the next day, when their youngest member is set to integrate his school. Their fear is as palpable as their ambivalence: "We're doing what we have to do, I guess," his mother reasons, and his older sister says, "But it seems so unfair...sending him there all by himself like that." In story after story, Oliver demonstrates nuance, sensitivity, and a profound understanding for characters of varying ages, races, and classes. In "The Closet on the Top Floor," a young Black woman is, again, the first person of color at her school--a college this time--and her sense of otherness is immediately made clear. "They were all wearing white raincoats," Oliver writes of the woman's classmates, "but hers was a kind of pale blue, making her stand out from the rest." Like the other stories in this collection, it is exquisitely observed. With a crystalline clarity and finely attuned ear, Oliver depicts her subjects with elegance and profound understanding.

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Starred review from January 1, 2024
Oliver's marvelous, posthumously published short-story collection (the 22-year-old Iowa Writers' Workshop student died in 1966 in an accident) illustrates life in the Jim Crow South. These 14 vivid, transportive tales, some never before published, portray deeply layered characters in scenes that convey the heartrending, life-threatening reality of segregated America. A family tries to prepare their youngest child to be the first to integrate a school. A young mother waits for hours with her children, in vain, to see a doctor. A new college student becomes invisible to her white classmates. These situations are described with cinematic, sometimes granular detail, as in the remarkable "Before Twilight," in which characters await arrest after attempting to eat in a whites-only restaurant: "They watched the people leave the dining room, in little groups, sometimes alone. . . . In a matter of minutes, the Rose Crest Tea Room was empty of white customers. The rosy light continued to glow but there were nothing but quiet tables and vacant chairs to bask in the warmth." As novelist Tayari Jones writes in her captivating introduction, reading Oliver's remarkable stories "evokes the feeling of sorting through a time capsule sealed and buried in the yard of a southern African Methodist church in the early 1960s." A necessary addition to the American canon and every library collection.

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