Some of Them Will Carry Me

by Giada Scodellaro

Overview

“This is a book of wonders, full of intricate beauty, and Giada Scodellaro is an extraordinary talent.” —Katie Kitamura

Giada Scodellaro’s debut is a fiercely original collection of stories ranging in length, style, and tone—a collage of social commentary, surrealism, recipes, folklore, art— that centers Black women in moments of imminent change. In language that is lyrical, minimal, and often absurd, the diverse stories in Some of Them Will Carry Me deconstruct intimacy while building a surprising, unnerving new reality of language, culture, consumption, and loss.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948980159
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/11/2022
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	526,197
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Giada Scodellaro is a writer and photographer born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, NY. She holds an MFA from the New School. Some of Them Will Carry Me is her first book.

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/31/2022

Scodellaro debuts with a wild and wonderful collection of surreal and enigmatic accounts of sex, relationships, and encounters with strangers. The one-page opener, “The Cord,” offers an electric invitation to Scodellaro’s world of strange possibilities. In it, a woman meets a man on a bus and, from the seat next to his, guides his hand under her skirt. Then, with the fingers that were inside her, the man pulls the cord for his stop. “Now I’m on the cord,” the woman narrates, “and soon others will pull it... and some of them will carry me.” Tenuous connections such as this drive other stories. In “Triangle,” a woman observes a couple on the street and follows them home into their building. “The Balcony” concerns a woman who is seeking peace while her apartment is being renovated, and she begins having sex with a woman from the construction crew. “Spalding,” a highlight, finds a woman named Jazmynn sleeping among belongings left by her ex. Then a strange woman visits and spends the night, and Jazmynn makes room for her on the bed amid her old partner’s rusted bike, his basketball, and items from the pantry. The stories aren’t linked in the conventional sense, but once the reader adjusts to the author’s vision, they suggest a unified meaning. It’s an auspicious and consistently suprising first outing. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

The female protagonists who appear in Scodellaro’s kinetic début collection of stories find themselves in absurdist and fantastical scenarios that interrogate the nature of subjectivity.” —The New Yorker, “The Best Books of 2022”
 
“Scodellaro debuts with a wild and wonderful collection of surreal and enigmatic accounts of sex, relationships, and encounters with strangers. . . . It’s an auspicious and consistently surprising first outing.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
 
“These are Black characters whose existence in their surreal landscape is as natural as the soft mentions of cocoa butter on thighs. A world immediately recognizable even in its strangeness. A world confident in and of itself. These are the soft and fragrant spaces of the dreams of Black writers and readers alike. The wholeness of the marginalized existence, what it is like inside the body and inside the love when not viewed from the outside.” —Georgie Fehringer, The Rumpus
 
“Some of Them Will Carry Me contains thirty-five stories, none like the last. Many are short: gut-punches and tilt-a-whirls and cold plunges. They are immersive, rapid experiences with an impact disproportionate to their length.” —Maggie Lange, Purse Book Newsletter
 
“An enthralling, brilliant debut collection of stories that vary in length but are equal in craft. . . . Scodellaro questions assumptions and conjures questions—of belonging and of allowance. She writes the same nature of delicate and meandering autofiction that has long been the domain of white writers, reorienting the reader to narrators that are detached and yet wholly present, whose identities inform their observation and ultimate remarks. A stunning collection from a promising singular new talent.” —Meghana Kandlur, Open Books (Chicago)

"This debut collection is not to be missed. Some as short as a paragraph, or even a sentence, Scodellaro’s stories capture a broad spectrum of life’s joy, disgust, complexity, and unusual specificity that yet contains multitudes . . . Readers encountering this extraordinary book for the first time will rejoice." —Booklist, Starred Review

“This is a book of wonders, full of intricate beauty, and Giada Scodellaro is an extraordinary talent.” —Katie Kitamura

“In Some of Them Will Carry Me, Giada Scodellaro enthralls as she evokes the best of the lushly slow and quiet European films of the 1960s, with their long, wide, starkly gorgeous shots, deeply detached yet viscerally sensual plotlines, and lonely meandering figures crossing landscapes. But what is more powerful is how she reorganizes those canonized spaces to foreground the subjectness of brown bodies and to imbue her female characters with volition. It’s a virtuosic reframing, done with seductive and disarming brevity. A stunning debut.” —Renee Gladman

“Riveting, evocative, written with intensity and purpose, these potent, self-contained fictions have a vitality all their own—and they announce the arrival of a brilliant new voice in literature.” —Alexandra Kleeman

From the Publisher

2022-07-08
A debut collection of three dozen stories with the logic of dreams.

Like dreams, Scodellaro’s stories can feel like a jumble of puzzle pieces that are hard to put together. Take, for example, “Freedom of White Boys in the Sand,” which opens with a girl shouting obscenities at a group of White men, who enjoy a kind of privileged obliviousness while also being on the verge of extinction. Meanwhile, other people dressed in secondhand suits watch her, speculating about why she’s there: Is she a widow looking for a new partner? Or a ghost in search of her murderer? Later, she reveals she’s trying to find her sister, who went off to buy a helicopter. Instead of featuring conventional plots, these pieces, whose protagonists are often Black women, map physical spaces, focus on characters’ bodies and gestures, and inventory objects. All this detail, however, is the opposite of grounding: instead, it creates a profound feeling of dislocation and disconnection, one of the collection’s themes. In “YYYY,” the narrator prides himself on being observant but fails to see the important things—like his companion’s tears. Another character notes that while objects can “tether us,” they also “can be meaningless garbage.” While some of the longer stories feel wandering, Scodellaro’s shorter ones often land with striking intensity. “Cabbage, The Highest Arch” paints an incisive portrait of a woman in two pages, while “The Foot of the Tan Building” contemplates our indifference to tragedy by examining the body of a woman who jumped to her death, “her running shoes exposed, her childlike ankles exposed,” and “Forty-Seven Days Ago” uses a grocery list’s worth of liquids—“vegetable broth, apple cider vinegar, low sodium soy sauce, extra virgin olive oil…”—to evoke the narrator’s heartbrokenness.

Singular stories that will reward patient readers.

Kirkus Reviews