Insurrections: Stories

by Rion Amilcar Scott

Overview

A suicidal father looks to an older neighbor — and the Cookie Monster — for salvation and sanctuary as his life begins to unravel. A man seeking to save his estranged, drug-addicted brother from the city's underbelly confronts his own mortality. A chess match between a girl and her father turns into a master class about life, self-realization, and pride: "Now hold on little girl.... Chess is like real life. The white pieces go first so they got an advantage over the black pieces."

These are just a few glimpses into the world of the residents of the fictional town of Cross River, Maryland, a largely black settlement founded in 1807 after the only successful slave revolt in the United States. Raw, edgy, and unrelenting yet infused with forgiveness, redemption, and humor, the stories in this collection explore characters suffering the quiet tragedies of everyday life and fighting for survival.

In Insurrections, Rion Amilcar Scott's lyrical prose authentically portrays individuals growing up and growing old in an African American community. Writing with a delivery and dialect that are intense and unapologetically current, Scott presents characters who dare to make their own choices — choices of kindness or cruelty — in the depths of darkness and hopelessness. Although Cross River's residents may be halted or deterred in their search for fulfillment, their spirits remain resilient — always evolving and constantly moving.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813174402
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	07/20/2017
Series:	University Press of Kentucky New Poetry & Prose Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	736,287
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Rion Amilcar Scott teaches English at Bowie State University. He earned an MFA at George Mason University, where he won both the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award and a Completion Fellowship. His work has appeared in publications such as the Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, PANK, The Rumpus, Fiction International, the Washington City Paper, The Toast, and Confrontation.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Rion Amilcar Scott's Insurrections is a rich and vibrant collection of short stories about the citizens of the fictional town Cross River, Maryland. Like the tales of old, these stories speak with a resonant truth, an irrefutable wisdom. And they stay with you because every word comes from the author's humor and from his humanity. This is a masterful debut, an important and necessary contribution to American letters." — Jeffery Renard Allen, author of the novels Song of the Shank and Rails Under My Back

"A wildly impressive and ambitious collection of stories, Rion Amilcar Scott's Insurrections affirms that it can be the smallest human choices — of tenderness, kindness, and cruelty, that make our people, and our world, what it is." — Lisa Williams, author of Gazelle in the House

"Rion Amilcar Scott's Insurrections announces an urgent, clarion new voice in the American short story. This is a collection bursting at the seams with voice, with lexicon and ache, with the beating heart of a broad chorus on a confined canvas. It brings to mind a wide range of our finest story writers, past and present: Flannery O'Connor and Edward P Jones, Junot Diaz and even David Foster Wallace. Read this book. Read it slowly, like it deserves, but read it right now, and savor it." — Daniel Torday, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West

"Scott is a deeply talented writer who has managed that most precarious of fusions while dealing with important subject matter: a recognition of life's complexity combined with writing that sings." — Courtney Brkic, author of  The First Rule of Swimming

"The characters of Insurrections are confronted with the near impossible task of escaping the long shadow of memory. What binds these tales of family rupture and thwarted hopes is a deep empathy, which courses through the pages like a powerful current. Rion Amilcar Scott is the real deal: a writer with vision, wit, intelligence, and fierce feeling." — Ravi Mangla, author of Understudies

Editorial Reviews

"Scott's fiction is at once incredibly precise, rooted in contemporary reality, and dreamy, magical, uncertain.... This book is the finest collection of short stories I have read in a very long time, and Scott is a major new voice. You can't afford to miss him." — Brooklyn Magazine

"Quite a revelation." — Rigoberto González, author of Unpeopled Eden and Men Without Bliss

"By turns heartbreaking, darkly funny, and compelling, Insurrections delivers a panorama of modern life within a close-knit community, and the way the present day can be influenced by past histories, past generations. Scott, a lecturer at Bowie State, is a writer you should be reading, and this book serves as a nice entry point for first-timers." — The Millions

"Scott is an impressive ventriloquist, adopting a number of disparate narrative voices over the course of the book. He offers many brilliant lines... and writes about race, fatherhood, lust, and envy with estimable candor." — The Millions

"Sad, violent, frustrating stories told in high-energy language, creating a very real imaginary world." — , Kirkus

"An auspicious debut." — Largehearted Boy

From the Publisher

2016-05-24
Thirteen stories chronicle the way things go for the African-American residents of Cross River, a fictional town in Maryland, in this debut collection.A man who fails at hanging himself also fails at entertaining at his son's birthday party in a ratty Cookie Monster suit. A man who can't win at much else beats his 11-year-old daughter at chess 202 times in a row. A man trying to find his lost, addicted brother accidentally leads the people he's hiding from right to him. A man goes to a barber who is certain to ruin his hair…and has his hair ruined. Kids torment their teachers, talk trash, throw rocks, are beaten by their parents, watch pornography on the eve of their religious confirmation. Nothing goes smoothly in Cross River, and most things go very badly indeed. As a footnote in a story called "Party Animal" explains, "It was determined that the CRPD, a largely African American force, was seventeen times more likely to use deadly force against minority suspects than similarly-sized police departments." A guy on the way to a job interview is mistakenly arrested when he is taken for someone named Juba. Upon his release, he finds out that everyone in town knows about Juba but him. "Some said I was lucky I still had a life. Others tied Juba to a police slaying so many months ago. A good number of people described Juba as a happy-go-lucky guy, the Santa Claus of marijuana peddlers, a grandfatherly guy with good advice and a sack of chronic. Only I, it seemed, had never heard of Juba." When he finally finds Juba, he finds a true son of Cross River, part ethnographer, part linguist, part historian. This is a town founded on the site of the only successful slave revolt in U.S. history. As the narrator of the final story, "Three Insurrections," puts it, "They burn down the plantation and kill they masters dead….Got a town standing to this day in America. They ain't never shut it down."Sad, violent, frustrating stories told in high-energy language, creating a very real imaginary world.

Kirkus Reviews

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