THE CONFOUNDING INSISTENCE ON INNOCENCE

TEN YEARS AFTER HER DEBUT STORY COLLECTION, BEFORE YOU SUFFOCATE YOUR OWN FOOL SELF, MARKED HER ARRIVAL AS A BOLD NEW VOICE IN AMERICAN SHORT FICTION, DANIELLE EVANS RETURNS WITH HER SECOND, THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS, A TIMELY RECKONING WITH, AMONG OTHER THINGS, AMERICA’S HISTORY OF RACIALIZED VIOLENCE.

- DANIELLE EVANS

THE DEBUT story collection by Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, was published in 2010, when the author was just twenty-six years old. Rightly heralded as a significant new voice in American short fiction, Evans was selected a year later as a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. And although her work has regularly appeared in a number of publications during the intervening years—her credits include the Paris Review and A Public Space, and her writing has been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories series no less than four times—readers have waited a decade for a new book by Evans, a recent National Endowment for the Arts fellow.

The wait is over. In November, Riverhead Books will publish her new collection of stories and a novella, The Office of Historical Corrections. Not that Evans, who teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, is overly concerned with the decadelong gap. “If we’re chasing potentially impossible goals anyway,” she told me, “you chase a book you hope will be read for a long time, not a book that will be finished quickly.”