Kiss the Scars on the Back of My Neck: Stories

by Joe Okonkwo

Overview

Independent Publishers Awards (IPPY) Silver Medalist in LGBT+ Fiction

The eclectic stories in this collection are bound by the threads of desire in its many forms, above all, the desire for love and a place of safety in a world where being Black and gay can thwart the fulfillment of that longing. The characters are complex, driven, difficult, and even, at times, unsympathetic, but always compelling. In other words: fully rounded human beings living complicated lives.

A proud Black woman who escaped her rural, impoverished town returns after the collapse of her marriage and faces the scorn of those she left behind. A middle-aged gay man finds his loneliness temporarily relieved by the arrival of a stray cat. An unhappily married woman becomes enmeshed in her bisexual husband's attempt to create a ménage à trois with a much younger man. A 16-year-old boy discovers the power of his sexuality when he embarks upon a dangerous seduction. Two Black men, one mature and rich, the other young and struggling, are drawn into a contentious affair by their shared love of opera. The legendary blues singer Glady Bentley crashes up against the barriers of race and gender when she gets caught up in a police raid.

Kiss the Scars on the Back of My Neck is a masterful collection of stories by a gifted writer who has fully hit his stride.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612942032
Publisher:	Bywater Books MI
Publication date:	08/10/2021
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Joe Okonkwo is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and editor. His debut novel Jazz Moon won the Publishing Triangle’s prestigious 2016 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction. A cum laude graduate of the University of Houston with a B.A. in theater, Joe made his living for a number of years as an actor, stage manager, director, playwright, and youth theater instructor. He also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from City College of New York.

Table of Contents

Picnic Street 1

Skin 13

Paulie 23

Gift Shop 48

The Girls' Table 74

Fluff 81

You Can't Do That to Gladys Bentley! 96

Cleo 113

Kiss the Scars on the Back of My Neck 122

Kiss the Scars: A Playlist 179

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Joe Okonkwo's storytelling talents are on full display in his new collection. Moving through a range of eras and settings, the finely drawn characters in these nine short stories navigate sex, love, power, betrayal, and belonging as they strive to live as their full and veracious selves.” —Lisa Ko, author of National Book Award finalist, The Leavers

“Vivid, taut, slyly funny, bitchy, steamy, kinky, painful, melancholy, tender—all those words and more describe the stories contained here. Okonkwo fluidly moves between eras, points of view, and narrative voices to spin a collection of tales that capture people—Black and white, gay and straight and ambiguous, bougie and low-down—at their best and worst, striving for sex, status, and true love. Whether the conflicts are mothers and sons, bisexual love triangles or schoolmates turned lovers, the characters in Okonkwo’s stories pinball against one another in surprising ways, many of them reuniting once more in the final title story, a moving and complex crescendo.”— Tim Murphy, author of Christodora and Correspondents

“Centering Black voices, queer voices, and femme voices, Kiss the Scars on the Back of My Neck presents unforgettable characters in stories that are equal parts heartbreaking and hilarious, and, at times, achingly sexy. In this far-ranging collection—moving from Prohibition-era jazz clubs to the Reagan ‘80s to present-day hook-up app culture, swinging from child narrators to single mothers, and including several thrillingly-linked stories—Okonkwo explores what it means to be human in all its glorious messiness. — Raul Mehta, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of No Other World and Quarantine

“Joe Okonkwo has a keen eye and ear for the way human beings talk to each other and think about themselves. The stories in Kiss the Scars on the Back of My Neck range from the woundedness of the modern age to the defiant power of the glorious Harlem Renaissance, shimmering from start to finish with passion, love, rage, loneliness, and danger. A remarkable examination of the human condition.” —William J. Mann, author of The Wars of the Roosevelts and Hello Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand