Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ debut is a knockout.” “The stories here are dazzling, wise, wicked and tender. Heads of the Colored People is a necessary and powerful new collection with, thankfully, not a dull sentence to be found.” “Nafissa Thompson-Spires has a way of staring intense, awkward, comic, and sorrowful situations right in the face. The eleven vignettes in Heads of the Colored People elevate the unusual and expose the unseen, forming an original-and urgent-portrait of American life.” 'With devastating insight and remarkable style, Nafissa Thompson-Spires explores what it means to come to terms with one’s body, one’s family, one’s future. Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the real deal. 'This is one of the best short story debuts I’ve read in my whole life. Thankfully, Nafissa Thompson-Spires gave it to us now.” The nation needed Heads of Colored People 40 years ago. The super thin lines between terror, intimacy, humor and hubris are masterfully toed, jumped and ultimately redrawn in the most exciting and soulful fiction I've read this century. “Nafissa Thompson-Spires has taken the best of what Toni Cade Bambara, Paul Beatty, Morgan Parker and Junot Diaz do plus a whole lot of something we've never seen in American literature, blended it all together and giving us one of the finest short story collections I've ever read. Located on the big questions, they are full of heart.' 'Vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive, these stories by the vastly talented Thompson-Spires create a compelling surface tension made of equal parts skepticism towards human nature and intense fondness of it.

'A bold new voice, at once insolently sardonic and incisively compassionate, asserts itself amid a surging wave of young African-American fiction writers.Thompson-Spires’ auspicious beginnings auger a bright future in which she could set new standards for the short story.'

Heads of the colored people stories