Writers Dantiel W. Moniz and Jamel Brinkley discussed the art of writing the short story and Moniz’s debut collection of short stories Milk Blood Heat. In the stories, Moniz delves into the ordinary lives of characters who find themselves in moments of self-reckoning, grappling with traumas past and present. Milk Blood Heat announces Moniz as a bright new talent to the literary world.
Brinkley is a celebrated writer, whose most recent collection of short stories, A Lucky Man, was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction and earned the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence in 2018.
Featured Book
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Milk Blood Heat
By Dantiel W. Moniz
Published by Grove Press
A livewire debut from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today’s literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another.
A thirteen-year-old meditates on her sadness and the difference between herself and her white best friend when an unexpected tragedy occurs; a woman recovering from a miscarriage finds herself unable to let go of her daughter—whose body parts she sees throughout her daily life; a teenager resists her family’s church and is accused of courting the devil; servers at a supper club cater to the insatiable cravings of their wealthy clientele; and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their father’s ashes and are forced to face the troubling reality of how he continues to shape them.
Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat forms an ouroboros of stories that bewitch with their truth, announcing the arrival of a bright new literary star.
