The Last Suspicious Holdout: Stories

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Fiercely intelligent, warm in their own way, and absolutely absorbing. . . . Excellent excellent excellent.Roxane Gay

Ladee Hubbard is a true original, and this book is a unique beauty.Mary Gaitskill

The critically acclaimed author ofThe Rib Kingreturns with an eagerly anticipated collection of interlocking short stories including the title story written exclusively for this volume, that explore relationships between friends, family and strangers in a Black neighborhood over fifteen years.

The thirteen gripping tales InTheLastSuspiciousHoldout, the new story collection by award-winning author Ladee Hubbard,deftly chronicle poignant moments in the lives of an African American community located in a sliver of southern suburbia. Spanning from 1992 to 2007,the stories represent a period during which the Black middle-class expanded while stories of "welfare Queens," "crack babies," and "super predators" abounded in the media. In False Cognates, a formerly incarcerated attorney struggles with raising the tuition to keep his troubled son in an elite private school. In There He Go, a young girl whose mother moves constantly clings to a picture of the grandfather she doesnt know but invents stories of his greatness. Characters spotlighted in one story reappear in another, providing a stunning testament to the enduring resilience of Black people asthey navigate the post-racial periodTheLastSuspiciousHoldoutso vividly portrays.

Reviews

"Keenly observed, both in exterior details and interior psychological realities,LadeeHubbards short stories capture the absurd, charming, brave, beautiful, and grotesque acts that are the pivot points of specific Black lives.With prose bone spare and elegant, she reveals the swagger required to keep seeing and to be seen." Alice Randall, author of Black Bottom Saints "I loved these interconnected stories. They are fiercely intelligent, warm in their own way, and absolutely absorbing. Hubbard has a deft sense of character and community and I really enjoyed piecing together the connections between the collections characters. Excellent excellent excellent." Roxane Gay For sheer reading pleasure Ladee Hubbards original and wildly inventive novel is in a class by itself. Toni Morrison on The Talented Ribkins

Author Bio

Ladee Hubbard is the author of The Talented Ribkins which received the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Times Literary Supplement, Copper Nickel and Callaloo. She is a recipient of a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and has also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Art Omi, the Sacatar Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Born in Massachusetts and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida, she currently lives in New Orleans with her husband and three children.