Danielle Evans’ Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self is a remarkable short-story collection in a good year for short-story collections. Every story takes on its own life, all her characters live rich and complicated lives, and the plotting never grows too predictable or unfocused. Evans has a few of the problems typical of young short-story writers, but for the most part, this is a collection of perfectly conceived little tales that look at underexposed corners of American life.
The biggest issue with Suffocate is that nearly every story features a similar protagonist. Evans writes this protagonist—a young African-American or mixed-race woman who’s trapped between her past and a more promising future—extremely well, but when the first three stories all center on basic variations of the type, it leads to diminishing returns. Evans does feature a handful of stories with different protagonists, including a young man recently returned from Iraq and in over his head with an old girlfriend, but she’s right back to her comfort zone in the next story.