Give My Love to the Savages audiobook

Next level. One of the best series of short stories I’ve read this year. Probably thee best. Highlights include — all of it.. but for real my personal favourites were: - How to Be a Dick in the Twenty-First Century- And Then We Were the Norrisses - Chuck & Tina Go on Vacation - The Lives & Loves of Melvin J. Plump, Esq. and of course the title story which was amazing. You know Chris Stuck is reminding me of Walter Mosley. I love how he’s able to reflect the experiences, choices, realities, mistakes and the essence of the various circumstances of Black men and boys in the lives of these fictionalized characters. Some of the stories were a trip! I’m thinking of Chuck and Tina Go on Vacation. The passages where Tina is smacking kids in the face and doing the most threw me for a loop. I don’t know why it was so vivid to me but it was! Also some of the the character names: Chuck Norris, Sterling Silver and Frosty Flake, BRUH! The fact that I enjoy so much work by & about Black women, this lens and these stories were well appreciated. Chris Stuck took me through a gamut of emotions and every page was appreciated!

Stories built on foundations of unbalanced karma, the self identifying itself and male douchebaggery where (oftentimes) the inner pessimistic optimist lets the outer optimistic pessimist’s joy really bum him out, only to then retaliate with focused blind passion. I was introduced to the term “get your poops in a group” in this collection, and that, in a nutshell, is the goal of it’s protagonists, though some poops do get lost here and there.

Goldlink could easily transform all these stories into his next album.

Review to come.

Portland writer Chris Stuck consistently dazzles throughout this collection of very funny, occasionally brutal, and stylistically varied short stories. My favorites were the Jordan Peele-esque "Lake No Negro" (featuring a narrator who finds himself the fetishized target of suburban swingers), the surprisingly endearing witness protection story "And Then We Were the Norisses," and the hilarious dialogue-driven barroom scenes in "This Isn't Music." Stuck's attention to odd details, even in the more ambitious conceptual stories (a man literally becomes a penis, a conservative black man with vitiligo goes on a cruise with a boatful of people with physical ailments) is never less than sharp and thoughtful and had me laughing out loud several times. A strong and risk-taking debut.

Imaginative, inventive writing that turns the short story upside down. At times hilariously surreal, gut-punchingly dizzying, and immensely tender, this collection-threaded by themes of racism, masculinity, youth, identity, family, and grief—swam around in my mind, and found home in my dreams. Truly unlike anything I’ve ever read, and one of those books that demands not just to be read, but to be explored.

What a ride. This is my latest journey into short story reading and it did not disappoint. While not every story resonated with me most of the entries had a familiar tone. My favorites were the last two stories, the final one sharing the of the entire anthology Give My Love to the Savages. If you are looking for a range of experiences on Black manhood, coming of age and identity you will enjoy this collection.

There is plenty of serious, hard-hitting content here, but it's often tempered by clever humor and a loose, engaging style that makes each story fly by. "The Lives and Loves of Melvin J. Plump, ESQ." is the real masterpiece here, but every tale is memorable. I can't wait to read more from this exciting writer.

Chris Stuck does a number of things I really like in this volume. He plays with names. He varies the tone from one story to the next, sometimes even within a story. And boy, does he ever stick the endings.The stories focus on Black or biracial men, yet there’s a lot of diversity. Some are successful, some have lost, or are losing, that success, and some haven’t quite gotten there yet. Ages range from teens to middle age; a few stories are second person; one reads like a memoir. Not all of these men seem like good guys at first, but they’re all struggling to figure it out, and that generates a great deal of empathy.FMI see my blog post at A Just Recompense.

A nicely varied collection of stories: all deal with some aspect of the contemporary Black male American experience, but the emotional tone, the fantasticalness, the humor all vary pretty dramatically from story to story. It makes for an enjoyable series of surprises, as you finish one story you have no idea where things are going to go in the subsequent entry. For me, as a white man, these stories about (to a greater or lesser degree) about being Black, were thought-provoking, insightful and illuminating.

Give my love to the savages are nine shorts stories that focus on Black or biracial men. These stories touch on real black men lives from the lost ones to the successful ones. These stories gives you so much dynamics, you have the characters where you just want to hug and nurture like your child and then you have the ones that you just want to punch in the face like Richard Dickerson. I enjoyed it all around and I recommend this short story collection to all the black men.

It’s difficult to describe how much I reflected deeply on this short story collection and also how much I just straight up laughed out loud. Chris reckons with topics that feel underrepresented in literary fiction today, including our role models as men. His writing can only be described as sharp as hell, too, and when he wants, he can dial into a hilarious sensation (“salon door boogers” lol) or zoom out into a treatise on life. I can’t overstate how much you should read this.

Stories GaloreThis title highlights various Black American experiences. In my opinion, each little story can be a novel on it's own. Most of the stories were riveting to say the least. I'm just a bit disappointed that mostly all of them left the reader hanging in suspense. But, I guess that is a trait of a good book, huh?

The perspective and characters are new for me, and I appreciate the rawness of this so much, it was fiction but told the story of a certain reality I will never be a part of. This will go in the category of books I would want to have on my book shelf, (since I borrowed this from the library).

An exceptional debut collection of incisive short stories.'How to Be a Dick in the Twenty-First Century' and 'Lake No Negro' being amongst of my favourites.The stories canvass the most serious of topics but with an underlying sense of 'twisted' humour.Highly recommend.