Dancers on the Shore

A beautiful collection of short stories written many years ago that are still relevant in today’s society. I wish some of the stories were just a bit longer as they were starting to get interesting at the end.......more

Absolutely fantastic stuff. Contains some of the best short stories I have read in a long long time, made even more interesting by the links between them ( one could group two sets together, for example, and form a couple of very good episodic novellas about the two families) and the fact that the s......more

Kelley in short story form is very good. not phenomenal as some of these read and felt uneven to me, though, the quintessential essence of Kelley did not fall short. His explorations of voice, humor, and identity was true to style. the fact that he wrote "The Poker Party" as a student should tell you......more

In a really good short story collection, there might be two or three stories that give me what I call the ‘pang’ – a feeling in my chest towards the end of the story which is like a sucker-punch of truth. It is not about an unexpected twist, necessarily, but a line of dialogue or a gesture that has......more

Originally published in 1964, Dancers on the Shore is a collection of interconnected short stories. Some of the stories are completely independent, while others can be seen as vignettes describing events that took place in the history of two African American families — the Dunfords and the Bedlows.......more