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In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters—from children to grandmothers to ghosts—live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to
connect with, stand up for, care for, and remember one another, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape their futures as well as the legacies and prospects of their communities and their city.
In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, and the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations, where strangers might sometimes
show kindness while those we trust—doctors, employers, siblings—too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill, dancing in the street, glimpsing your purpose, change on the horizon.
With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 29, 2023 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9798890591739
- File size: 225086 KB
- Duration: 07:48:55
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from June 12, 2023
In his dazzling sophomore collection, Brinkley (A Lucky Man) digs into the promises and dangers of intimacy and the costs of speaking up or staying silent. In the title story, a Black woman named Bernice, who is suffering from an unknown illness, advises her brother “when it... comes to those white doctors... always, always, exaggerate the pain.” In “Comfort,” Kelvin selflessly cares for Simone, a woman whose life has been derailed by her brother’s killing by police officers years earlier. “Bartow Station” centers on a young man who is unwilling to get help to deal with a past tragedy and is warned by the woman he’s dating that “one day it will all come out as a violence, like water spewing forth from a hose.” Elsewhere, a lonely woman imagines a deeper connection with a food delivery person, and a young father tries to justify relocating his aging father to assisted living. Throughout, Brinkley crafts unforgettable portraits, humming with barely restrained tension, of Black men and women exploring what it means to be part of families and communities that are awash in hope and disappointment alike. These intimate vignettes have the power to move readers.
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