Give My Love to the Savages: Stories

Summary

A provocative and raw debut collection of short fiction
reminiscent of Junot Diaz’s Drown.

A Black man’s life, told in scenes—through every time he’s been called nigger.
A Black son who visits his estranged white father in Los Angeles just as the
’92 riots begin. A Black Republican, coping with a skin disease that has turned
him white, is forced to reconsider his life. A young Black man, fetishized by an
older white woman he’s just met, is offered a strange and tempting
proposal. 

The nine tales in Give
My Love to the Savages illuminate the multifaceted Black
experience, exploring the thorny intersections of race, identity, and Black
life through an extraordinary cast of characters. From the absurd to the
starkly realistic, these stories take aim at the ironies and contradictions of
the American racial experience. Chris Stuck traverses the dividing lines, and
attempts to create meaning from them in unique and unusual ways. Each story
considers a marker of our current culture, from uprisings and sly and
not-so-sly racism, to Black fetishization and conservatism, to the obstacles
placed in front of Black masculinity and Black and interracial relationships by
society and circumstance.

Setting these stories across America, from Los Angeles, Phoenix
and the Pacific Northwest, to New York and Washington, DC, to the suburbs and
small Midwestern towns, Stuck uses place to expose the absurdity of race and
the odd ways that Black people and white people converge and retreat, rub
against and bump into one another.

Ultimately, Give My Love to the Savages is
the story of America. With biting humor and careful honesty, Stuck riffs on the
dichotomy of love and barbarity—the yin and yang of racial experience—and the
difficult and uncertain terrain Black Americans must navigate in pursuit of
their desires.

Give My Love to the Savages contains the following reprinted with permission. 

“And Then We Were The Norrises,” American Literary Review

“Cowboys,” Callaloo

“Every Time They Call You Nigger,” Meridian

“Give My Love to the Savages,” Bennington Review and The

Pushcart Prize Anthology XLV

“This Isn’t Music,” Natural Bridge

“How to Be a Dick in the Twenty-First Century,” StoryQuarterly