Give My Love To The Savages

“A harrowing portrait of race relations in America, as beautiful as it is urgent.”—Entertainment Weekly “Black satire with bite, like Zora Neale Hurston used to do, with a smile and a sharp elbow. A touch of Paul Beatty, a dose of Dolemite, and a serving of Dorothy Parker, too. Give My Love to the Savages announces Chris Stuck as a fearless talent, a debut that'll make your sides and your heart hurt.”—Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling “Give My Love To The Savages is a wildly inventive collection of provocative stories about navigating the minefield of black masculinity in America. Stuck’s fresh and fearless perspective overturns assumptions about race and identity to reveal complex layers of absurdity. At times merciless, always darkly funny, these are stories of unexpected communion, connection, and compassion.”—Chanelle Benz, author of The Gone Dead 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.

Five women must spend months alone together in a hostile jungle, threatened on land and in the water and—perhaps most dangerous of all—by their own exposed and violent passions, that turn them, into savages far worse than their hunters and enemies.

But teenager Sasha’s secret trumps them all: she is dating a vegetarian. This trait will never fly with the rest of the Savages, who are…uniquely carnivorous. Problems start to pile up. Sasha’s boyfriend convinces her to try going vegetarian for a month, but then leaves her for a vegan vigilante. Angelica attempts to pay her mounting credit card bill by allowing commercials to film in the family home, until one of Ivan’s pranks leaves a model dead in their bathroom. A detective hired to investigate Titus’s predatory business affairs notices the model’s disappearance, and starts to think that there may be something more sinister to the perfect-seeming Savages. He’s right, of course—they’re cannibals.

In a hilariously charming domestic memoir, America’s celebrated master of terror turns to a different kind of fright: raising children. In her celebrated fiction, Shirley Jackson explored the darkness lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. But in Life Among the Savages, she takes on the lighter side of small-town life. In this witty and warm memoir of her family’s life in rural Vermont, she delightfully exposes a domestic side in cheerful contrast to her quietly terrifying fiction. With a novelist’s gift for character, an unfailing maternal instinct, and her signature humor, Jackson turns everyday family experiences into brilliant adventures.

From birth, the Savage brothers were taught by their father, Deuce, that life is like a sandwich; any way you flip it, the bread comes first. They were taught to get money, not fall in love, so they left a wreckage of broken hearts on their road to getting money. Yet, now, as mature men, they realize that you're not rich until you have something that money can't buy. And money certainly cannot buy the women that have stolen these brothers' hard and stubborn hearts. Taye "City" Savage and Akira White's love story started in the projects. Ten years ago, they met when Akira was only a young girl and City was a grown man getting his hustle started. City and Akira's bond was strong, and their fate was inevitable, so they thought. However, before their bound could be sealed, life happened. They were torn apart by unimaginable circumstances, and they never saw one another again until a decade later. Yet, by that time, both City and Akira were involved, but they weren't so loyal to Nova and Davion that they could ignore the passion in their hearts that they still harbored for one another. The only thing that ever mattered to Keandre "Money" Savage was the hustle. He had never fallen in love, not even with his girlfriend of five years, Zoe Moore. Money and Zoe had the typical hood love that involved lots of fussing, fighting, and other women. Yet, Zoe was the only one in the relationship that was in love. Money only kept her by his side because she was the last woman standing. Along the way, he had ruined Zoe with every woman that he cheated on her with, and every lie he told. Now, Money is finally ready to shed his immature ways and settle down. Yet, Zoe finds herself in a desperate state of mind when she realizes that she is not the woman that Money has chosen to settle down with. Shamar Savages' only love has been his love for art. When his brothers financed his baby, Savage Ink, his only focus was his tattoo shop. Yet, he soon realizes that despite not even wanting it, he was falling for his friend and frequent dip, Taraji Green. However, Taraji had the same mindset as Shamar. Her only focus was becoming the baddest hair stylist in Chicago; not love. The last thing she wanted was a committed relationship with anyone, not even one of the infamous Savage brothers. Sometimes, the last thing a person wants to do is fall in love, but love sucks them in any way. That is exactly what happens with these Savage brothers and the women that adore them. As life always has it, love ain't that easy to obtain, especially when loving a man that was raised by the streets and whose first love is the hustle. In yet another urban tale by Jessica N. Watkins, death, sex, and chaos leads to unforeseen tragedy and unexpected love.

“Red Dawn meets Escape from New York and The Hunger Games” (Booklist) in an action-packed dystopian fantasy filled with “prose [that] is gorgeous and brilliant” and “tells a satisfyingly dark tale through alternating the two sisters’ points of view” (VOYA, starred review). It’s been nearly two decades since the Red Allies first attacked New York, and Manhattan is now a prisoner-of-war camp, ruled by Rolladin and her brutal, impulsive warlords. For Skyler Miller, Manhattan is a cage that keeps her from the world beyond the city’s borders. But for Sky’s younger sister, Phee, the POW camp is a dangerous playground of possibility, and the only home she’d ever want. When Sky and Phee discover their mom’s hidden journal from the war’s outbreak, they both realize there’s more to Manhattan—and their mother—than either of them had ever imagined. And after a group of strangers arrives at the annual POW census, the girls begin to uncover the island’s long-kept secrets. The strangers hail from England, a country supposedly destroyed by the Red Allies, and Rolladin’s lies about Manhattan’s captivity begin to unravel. Hungry for the truth, the sisters set a series of events in motion that end in the death of one of Rolladin’s guards. Now they’re outlaws, forced to join the strange Englishmen on an escape mission through Manhattan. Their flight takes them into subways haunted by cannibals, into the arms of a sadistic cult in the city’s Meatpacking District and, through the pages of their mom’s old journal, into the island’s dark and shocking past.

Dan Savage's nationally syndicated sex advice column, "Savage Love," enrages and excites more than four million people each week. In The Kid, Savage tells a no-holds-barred, high-energy story of an ordinary American couple who wants to have a baby. Except that in this case the couple happens to be Dan and his boyfriend. That fact, in the face of a society enormously uneasy with gay adoption, makes for an edgy, entertaining, and illuminating read. When Dan and his boyfriend are finally presented with an infant badly in need of parenting, they find themselves caught up in a drama that extends well beyond the confines of their immediate world. A story about confronting homophobia, falling in love, getting older, and getting a little bit smarter, The Kid is a book about the very human desire to have a family.