Witness, Jamel Brinkley
Witness, Jamel Brinkley
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Witness
Stories

Author: Jamel Brinkley

Narrator: Karen Chilton, Korey Jackson

Unabridged: 7 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 08/29/2023


Synopsis

What does it mean to really see the world around you—to bear witness? And what does it cost us, both to see and not to see?

In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters—from children to grandmothers to ghosts—live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to
connect with, stand up for, care for, and remember one another, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape their futures as well as the legacies and prospects of their communities and their city.

In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, and the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations, where strangers might sometimes
show kindness while those we trust—doctors, employers, siblings—too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill, dancing in the street, glimpsing your purpose, change on the horizon.

With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane on September 12, 2023

Brinkley is a masterful short story writer. Each of these stories is a whole world unto itself. The brilliant way he tells stories of Black communities and Black families in times of both feast and famine is matched by beautiful writing on a sentence level. This is an engaging and deeply satisfying......more

Goodreads review by Kasa on December 26, 2023

Only someone with an insider's knowledge of contemporary New York life could have written these stories. Jamel Brinkley, award winning writer who knows the neighborhoods of Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Fort Greene and others could take the gentrification and resultant social changes and spun them into g......more

Goodreads review by Kate on April 21, 2023

I love an author that's new for me, especially when they write like this. Witness is a collection of stories told from the point of view of an important witness to the events. Some are strange, some sad or disturbing but there are common themes of love, family and belonging in all the stories. My fa......more

Goodreads review by Craig on September 05, 2023

The best work of fiction I've read so far this year. I don't generally gravitate to short story collections, but having been impressed by Brinkley's debut, A Lucky Man, I moved this to the top of my to read shelf. All of the strengths of Lucky Man are here, but he also demonstrates an increased mast......more

Goodreads review by Tina on July 22, 2023

I love short stories so I was very excited to read WITNESS by Jamel Brinkley and I really enjoyed these stories! These ten stories focus on Black character’s experiences in their daily life, as families and friends, in moments from joy to grief. I enjoyed all the stories and my faves are Arrows and......more