The World Doesn’t Require You announces the arrival of a generational talent, as Rion Amilcar Scott shatters rigid genre lines to explore larger themes of religion, violence, and love―all told with sly humor and a dash of magical realism.
Established by the leaders of the country’s only successful slave revolt in the mid-nineteenth century, Cross River still evokes the fierce rhythms of its founding. In lyrical prose and singular dialect, a saga beats forward that echoes the fables carried down for generations―like the screecher birds who swoop down for their periodic sacrifice, and the water women who lure men to wet deaths.
Among its residents―wildly spanning decades, perspectives, and species―are David Sherman, a struggling musician who just happens to be God’s last son; Tyrone, a ruthless PhD candidate, whose dissertation about a childhood game ignites mayhem in the neighboring, once-segregated town of Port Yooga; and Jim, an all-too-obedient robot who serves his Master. As the book builds to its finish with Special Topics in Loneliness Studies, a fully-realized novella, two unhinged professors grapple with hugely different ambitions, and the reader comes to appreciate the intricacy of the world Scott has created―one where fantasy and reality are eternally at war.
Contemporary and essential, The World Doesn’t Require You is a “leap into a blazing new level of brilliance” (Lauren Groff) that affirms Rion Amilcar Scott as a writer whose storytelling gifts the world very much requires.
“Scott’s interweaving story collection covers generations and defies genre restrictions in a series of wry, magically tinged character studies. The book affirms Scott, who won awards for his first collection Insurrection, as a major unique literary talent.”- Entertainment Weekly
“A bold new talent emerges with this boundary-shattering collection of linked stories set in fictional Cross County, Maryland, founded by the leaders of America’s only successful slave uprising. Characters range from robots to sons of God in these magical realist stories about race, religion, and violence. Think of it as Faulkner meets Asimov.”- Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
“Scott joins a growing tradition of African-American authors fusing the folksy dystopian humor of George Saunders with the charged satire of Ishmael Reed, and expands on it brilliantly.”- Boris Kachka, Vulture
“You'll no doubt find yourself highlighting passages over and over again, consistently marveling over the author's storytelling genius.”- Quinn Keaney, Popsugar
“Powerful and revelatory.”- Erin Keane, Salon
“Each time I open to a passage I love, I think this man is a national treasure of a writer… What brilliance between the pages.”- Jacqueline Woodson
“Rion Amilcar Scott doesn’t hold back or tiptoe around issues about race. He’s the most courageous writer I know; and this collection is an excellent example and significant achievement. He’s now made his mark as a force to reckon with.”- Nicole Dennis-Benn
“I've been a fan of Rion Amilcar Scott's for years, but I was astonished by The World Does Not Require You, which seems a leap into a blazing new level of brilliance: it is a wild, restless, deeply intelligent collection of stories, each of which resists and subverts the limits of categorization. What a beautiful book.”- Lauren Groff
“Surreal, intertextual, and darkly comical stories... Rion Amilcar Scott writes in the tradition of George Schuyler and Ishmael Reed but with a distinctive wry, playful voice that is wholly his own. With breathtaking cruelty and devastating humor, Scott adduces the whole world in one community.”
- Nafissa Thompson-Spires
“In the midst of a renaissance of African American fiction, Rion Amilcar Scott's stories stand at the forefront of what's possible in this vanguard. Funny, sad, and always moving, these stories explore what it means to call a place like America home when it treats you with indifference or terror. The people in these stories are unforgettable, their lives recognizable, their voices, as written by Scott, wholly original.”- Kaitlyn Greenidge
The 21st-century surge of African American voices continues with these mischievous, relentlessly inventive stories whose interweaving content swerves from down-home grit to dreamlike grotesque.
Cross River, Maryland, rural and suburban at once, exists only in the imagination of its inventor. And in his second collection, Scott (Insurrections, 2016) manages to make this region-of-the-mind at once familiar and mysterious, beginning with Cross River’s origins as a predominantly African American community established by leaders of the only successful slave revolt—which never really happened. Nor for that matter were there ever any sightings of God doling out jelly beans at Easter time in Cross River, as chronicled in the opener, “David Sherman, the Last Son of God,” whose main character is a guitar prodigy struggling through his fraught relations with local clergy and other pious folk to play the sounds only he can hear. (“God,” David remembers somebody telling him, “answers all prayers and sometimes His answer is no.”) In another story, Tyrone, a doctoral candidate in cultural studies at mythical Freedman's University, submits a thesis positing that the practice of knocking on strangers’ doors and running away is rooted in black slave insurrection; he recruits a friend for his thesis’s practical application with lamentable results. There are also a pair of science fiction stories, set in a futuristic Cross River, in which the customs—and abuses—of antebellum slavery are replicated by humans on robots and cyborgs, who, over time, resent their treatment enough to plot rebellion. And there’s a novella, Special Topics in Loneliness Studies, chronicling an academic year at the aforementioned Freedman's University during which professors and students alike struggle with their deepest, darkest emotions. Even before that climactic performance, you’ve figured out that Cross River is meant to be a fun-house mirror sending back a distorted, disquietingly mordant reflection of African American history, both external and psychic. Somehow, paraphrasing one of Scott’s characters, it all manages to sound made-up and authentic at the same time.
Mordantly bizarre and trenchantly observant, these stories stake out fresh territory in the nation’s literary landscape. - Kirkus Reviews
Imagine a world where the son of God is alive and leading a struggling church gospel band. It’s also where a new, highly advanced line of service robots must confront their programming after being designed to resemble lawn jockeys, and a hitchhiker inadvertently finds himself on a road trip along the Underground Railroad.
Welcome to the imaginary town of Cross River, Md., the setting for Rion Amilcar Scott’s vivid “The World Doesn’t Require You.” The fiction collection is a rich, genre-splicing mix of alternate history, magical realism and satire that interrogates issues of race, sexism and where both meet here in the real world.
This is Scott’s second visit to Cross River, also home to his Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize-winning 2016 “Insurrections.” In addition to the above curiosities, the fictional town also lays claim to being the site of the only successful slave rebellion in U.S. history and is the meeting point of all sorts of past and present issues surrounding race.
Cross River stands in tragic contrast to the neighboring white-dominated town of Port Yooga. But Scott’s imagination runs deeper than simply placing his characters in opposition to a single force and instead examines the ways oppression is passed down and continues to thrive.
Consider the robot
at the heart of “The Electric Joy of Service.” Told from the
perspective of the new being (who shares a name with Twain’s
escaped slave in “Huckleberry Finn”), the story begins with the
robot’s inventor reveling in the absurd shock of a racist design.
“Rich whites will rush out to buy their own robot slaves,” Jim’s
Master assures his corporate investors, who are initially aghast.
“And we can make these things any race the customer pleases.”
The Robotic Personal Helpers (or Riffs) are a hit, however. After being betrayed by his partners, the Master uploads a virus to spread the facts behind Cross River to spur a cyborg rebellion. But he spares his first creation. “For you,” he promises Jim, “a gift: a patch to block the disease of history. Go on being content.”
It’s one of a few bitingly drawn scenarios that bring to mind the work of Paul Beatty, whose 2015 novel “The Sellout” won the Booker Prize with its barbed critique of post-racial America, or even the pointed surrealism of Boots Riley’s 2018 film “Sorry to Bother You.” But Scott digs a little deeper, returning to Jim in a later, longer story, “Mercury in Retrograde,” which finds Jim falling in love, yet in increased conflict with a more advanced new creation called Fiona.
Partly human and designed to satisfy the Master’s longing for controllable female companionship (and all the misogyny that implies), Fiona grows frustrated in both her role and with Jim’s reluctance to pursue freedom — even as he grows to understand the hatred in his appearance and in turn how bigotry is internalized. “I was disgusting,” Jim says. “My very existence a kind of hatefulness. Anyone who saw me would hate me. The more I studied, the more I asked: How could I not, likewise, hate me?”
But as they grow together, Fiona and Jim are driven apart as he’s proved unable to evolve far enough. “One can only fight their programming so much,” Jim admits to Fiona.
Scott has as vivid ear for description and pace, rendering one nightmarish story that feels like an unaired episode of Jordan Peele’s “Twilight Zone” reboot. Beginning with someone hitching a ride from a stranger into Cross River, the story wryly named after the chorus of Dr. Dre’s 1993 single “Let Me Ride” culminates in a drug-addled fever dream where images of racist caricatures merge with a party replete with sly nods toward the Wizard of Oz, R. Kelly and a “comedian who hadn’t made a funny remark in years” who delights those in a crowd by berating them.
While Scott needs only a few pages to make an impact, he devotes the bulk of “The World Doesn’t Require You” to the novella-length closer, “Special Topics in Loneliness Studies.” Telling the story of an academic rivalry at Cross River’s historically black Freedman’s University, “Special Topics” at first feels elusive, with a kitchen sink construction of emails, PowerPoint slides, essays and imagined folklore amid an unreliable narration, but it coalesces into an indictment of a patriarchal academic system that diminishes female voices.
Scott delivers his most direct critique via a student — primarily seen through her emails — who looks past the institution to a larger world where loneliness is “a motivator of low-level human tyranny.” The story connects to the upheaval of 2019 in a way that few recent works of fiction have.
“I don’t wish to end my loneliness,” she writes, defying the course’s goals. “I wish to learn from it, to grow from it so I can enjoy the inevitable and brief moments of oneness that are on the other side of isolation.” It’s far from the answer the professor had hoped for, but in the hands of someone as skilled as Scott, it’s impossible to deny. - Chris Barton
“God is from Cross River, everyone knows that. He was tall, lanky; wore dirty brown clothes and walked with a limp he tried to disguise as a bop.” And with this most irreverent of openings, Rion Amilcar Scott proves himself an impressive myth-slayer and fable-maker.
Set in the fictional community of Cross River, Md., this story, “David Sherman, the Last Son of God,” is about a son’s disappointment in his father, a preacher who’s had 13 children by five different women and eventually commits suicide when David is 16. After failing to find comfort for his grief or a steady gig in his brother’s church, David, a guitar prodigy, goes on a frantic, deadly search for the rhythm of Cross River.
David’s obsession is a harbinger for the rest of the collection. Stories like “Slim in Hell” pick up with the teenager’s adult transformation into “Dave the Deity,” now in anguish after watching his own temple burn at the hands of the Kid, a musician he’s long since expelled from his band because his “popular and catchy” songs “spread a poison, eroding the souls of his fans.” Slim, the temple’s piano player, is so haunted by the Kid’s disembodied face that he sets fire to the arsonist’s wild lair, while failing to recognize the hypocrisy of his crime. But this, of course, is partly the point: Scott casts most of his characters — mainly black and male — as misguided, paranoid and with a revolutionary flair.
That is not to say these characters are wrong. “The World Doesn’t Require You” reminds us that having to fight racism has a strange way of distorting everything one touches. Scott first explored such sentiments in his 2016 debut collection, “Insurrections,” which established Cross River as a predominantly black community founded in 1807 following the only successful slave revolt in the nation’s history. In the closing story, “Three Insurrections,” a fatherless son keeps the rebellious fantasy of Cross River alive for a new generation.
Scott has said that “in my fiction I’m attempting to write about blackness in the varied and multitudinous ways that I’ve experienced it.” But simply sidelining white racist characters, as both of his collections do, doesn’t erase the lingering effects of slavery. In the new book, two jarring stories, “The Electric Joy of Service” and “Mercury in Retrograde,” feature futuristic robot slaves “designed … to look like the grossest blackface caricature.” Their very presence in this society reaffirms the failure of Cross River, a place strictly divided along class lines, to live up to its black utopian founding.
The book closes with a novella, “Special Topics in Loneliness Studies,” told from the point of view of Dr. Simeon Reece, a disenchanted adjunct professor who shirks his duties at two other colleges to masquerade as a member of Freedman’s University’s English faculty, while hiding out from campus security in the basement of the communications building. Reece targets Freedman’s for its bourgeois politics, and the tenured Dr. Reginald Chambers for his internet porn habit and his uncritical teaching of a sexist poet.
Scott cleverly dismantles the conventions of the novella itself by incorporating into the narrative email exchanges, syllabuses, term papers, dream sequences, manifestoes, PowerPoint presentations and eerie photographs of black male plastic dolls. It is a dizzying collage of tones and styles that Scott pulls together with mastery and confidence.
Chambers’s sudden resolution with his wife, following a female student’s forceful repudiation of his misogyny (and that of the poet he teaches), is one of the book’s few stumbles. Unlike the female protagonists in “Insurrections,” the women in this book are primarily sirens, seducing the men of Cross River either to self-discovery or to their drowning deaths.
“With Cross River I want to create something weird and elliptical and black,” Scott has said. With two books under his belt, Scott seems to have barely skimmed the surface of the many more characters and conflicts he could explore in Cross River. - Salamishah Tillet
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/books/review/the-world-doesnt-require-you-rion-amilcar-scott.html
There's a reason, though, why you've likely never heard of Cross River — it exists only in the imagination of author Rion Amilcar Scott, who returns to the fictional town in his second short story collection, The World Doesn't Require You. Scott's 2016 debut, Insurrections, was a breakout hit for the Maryland author, and showcased his sprawling imagination and beautiful writing. His follow-up, filled with the same dark humor and exuberant risk-taking, is somehow even better.
The first story in the book introduces readers to one of Cross River's best-known residents: God. He doesn't stick around for long, however, taking his own life in the second paragraph, at which point the story begins to follow his youngest son, David Sherman, a street musician who lands in jail after he participates in an armed robbery that leaves his partner in crime dead.
When he gets out, he's determined to rededicate his life to music, and lands a gig performing in "the Church of the Ever-Loving Christ," where his brother, Christ III, is pastor. It's there that he pioneers a jazz-inflected sound that scandalizes his brother, but electrifies the congregation: "The music made the people dance sexy, lusty dances. Free-spirited movements that drew attention to their thrusting, shaking nether regions." The story is delightful, an intelligent and fun introduction to the world-in-a-town that Scott has created.
From there, it gets both darker and funnier. In the book's second story, a young man named Darius gets a visit from a childhood friend, Tyrone, a graduate student in cultural studies who's eager to share his dissertation. The paper focuses on a popular childhood game sometimes called "doorbell ditching," in which kids knock on a stranger's door and hide or run away; Tyrone insists that the game "was one of the very first things our ancestors did to spark the Great Insurrection."
Darius agrees to accompany his friend on a few rounds of the game, and soon gets addicted to it: "What was once unknown to me now seemed obvious. I hadn't just been playing a childhood game. I was participating in a tradition of rebellion, the same tradition of rebellion that [led] to the abolition of slavery, the weekend and the forty-hour work week." When the two bring the pranks to Cross River's mostly white neighboring town, though, the result is disastrous — it's a dark and hilarious story that satirizes both racism and academia.
The stories in The
World Doesn't Require You cross genres, with influences from science
fiction ("Mercury in Retrograde"), fantasy ("Numbers")
and straight-up horror (the unforgettably chilling "Rolling in
My Six-Fo ..."). Scott writes about the surreal and fantastic
with a straight face, content to let the weirder elements of his
stories to speak for themselves, and this technique lets his
characters shine through — there's a real sense of humanity in each
story, even the two in which the main character is a robot.
Scott's book ends with a firecracker of a novella, "Special Topics in Loneliness Studies." It's told from the point of view of Simeon Reece, who's kind of a professor at Freedman's University — which is to say, he's no longer employed there, but still teaches classes nonetheless, unbeknownst to the school's higher-ups. ("Somehow I always had students, even though my courses weren't officially offered by the university. No idea where they came from. I just set up shop every semester in an empty classroom and start lecturing.")
Reece's ultimate goal is to destroy academia as the world knows it, replacing it with "a whole army of ghost professors teaching ghost courses and our alternatively educated students would spread across the globe, undermining all our dead zombie institutions ... that dulled our senses." He finds an unwitting pawn to help realize his plan: Reginald Chambers, an English professor with a troubled home life who's been in hot water with the administration ever since he was caught viewing lesbian pornography on a school computer. The novella's ending is at once funny and wistful; it highlights Scott's sense of compassion without sacrificing his mordant edge.
Like all of the stories in The World Doesn't Require You, it's powerful, unexpected and dreamy. The book is less a collection of short stories than it is an ethereal atlas of a world that's both wholly original and disturbingly familiar; Scott proves to be immensely talented at conjuring an alternate reality that looks like an amplified version of our own. Bizarre, tender and brilliantly imagined, The World Doesn't Require You isn't just one of the most inventive books of the year, it's also one of the best. - Michael Schaub
Rion Amilcar Scott, Insurrections: Stories, The University Press of Kentucky, 2016.
These are just a few glimpses into the world of the residents of the fictional town of Cross River, Maryland, a largely black settlement founded in 1807 after the only successful slave revolt in the United States. Raw, edgy, and unrelenting yet infused with forgiveness, redemption, and humor, the stories in this collection explore characters suffering the quiet tragedies of everyday life and fighting for survival.
In Insurrections, Rion Amilcar Scott's lyrical prose authentically portrays individuals growing up and growing old in an African American community. Writing with a delivery and dialect that are intense and unapologetically current, Scott presents characters who dare to make their own choices -- choices of kindness or cruelty -- in the depths of darkness and hopelessness. Although Cross River's residents may be halted or deterred in their search for fulfillment, their spirits remain resilient -- always evolving and constantly moving.
"Scott's fiction is at once incredibly precise, rooted in contemporary reality, and dreamy, magical, uncertain. . . . This book is the finest collection of short stories I have read in a very long time, and Scott is a major new voice. You can't afford to miss him."―Brooklyn Magazine
"Quite a revelation."―Rigoberto González, author of Unpeopled Eden and Men Without Bliss"By turns heartbreaking, darkly funny, and compelling, Insurrections delivers a panorama of modern life within a close-knit community, and the way the present day can be influenced by past histories, past generations. Scott, a lecturer at Bowie State, is a writer you should be reading, and this book serves as a nice entry point for first-timers."―The Millions"Scott is an impressive ventriloquist, adopting a number of disparate narrative voices over the course of the book. He offers many brilliant lines . . . and writes about race, fatherhood, lust, and envy with estimable candor."―The Millions"Sad, violent, frustrating stories told in high-energy language, creating a very real imaginary world.", Kirkus"An auspicious debut."―Largehearted Boy"Rion Amilcar Scott's Insurrections is a rich and vibrant collection of short stories about the citizens of the fictional town Cross River, Maryland. Like the tales of old, these stories speak with a resonant truth, an irrefutable wisdom. And they stay with you because every word comes from the author's humor and from his humanity. This is a masterful debut, an important and necessary contribution to American letters."―Jeffery Renard Allen, author of the novels Song of the Shank and Rails Under My Back"A wildly impressive and ambitious collection of stories, Rion Amilcar Scott's Insurrections affirms that it can be the smallest human choices ―of tenderness, kindness, and cruelty, that make our people, and our world, what it is."―Lisa Williams, author of Gazelle in the House"Rion Amilcar Scott's Insurrections announces an urgent, clarion new voice in the American short story. This is a collection bursting at the seams with voice, with lexicon and ache, with the beating heart of a broad chorus on a confined canvas. It brings to mind a wide range of our finest story writers, past and present: Flannery O'Connor and Edward P Jones, Junot Diaz and even David Foster Wallace. Read this book. Read it slowly, like it deserves, but read it right now, and savor it."―Daniel Torday, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West"Scott is a deeply talented writer who has managed that most precarious of fusions while dealing with important subject matter: a recognition of life's complexity combined with writing that sings."―Courtney Brkic, author of The First Rule of Swimming"The characters of Insurrections are confronted with the near impossible task of escaping the long shadow of memory. What binds these tales of family rupture and thwarted hopes is a deep empathy, which courses through the pages like a powerful current. Rion Amilcar Scott is the real deal: a writer with vision, wit, intelligence, and fierce feeling."―Ravi Mangla, author of Understudies"The writing of Insurrections is energetic and musical―fully inhabiting a diverse array of storytelling styles. Scott, it appears, has a knack for finding the best structure toorganically fit the details of the plot. The stories are replete with vivid, visceral descriptions of action and character. Scott is able to get into the heads of his characters and bring them to life as real, complicated souls."―The Root"It was so refreshing to read stories that feature African-American men and boys as fully formed characters with hopes, dreams, and fears without relying on tired stereotypes and caricatures."―Education Week"In Scott's debut collection, Insurrections, teachers, barbers, and drug dealers ply their trades in the storefronts, schools, and streets of the D.C.-adjacent stomping ground, but it is the private lives of Cross Riverians that make up the book's beautiful beating heart."―Washington City Paper"A satisfying and moving collection of stories about those up against it. Written with grace and complexity with rich characters and brutality drawn bare, this collection is recommended for those who don't thrive on Hollywood endings."―Malcolm Avenue Review"Insurrections is not whispering lovingly to us with each turn of the page; it is screaming to be acknowledged―screaming for change."―Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly"In Scott's stories the ordinary becomes legend, and anything that self-righteously thinks itself sacred is taken down a few notches."―Berfrois"Scott's lyrical prose authentically portrays individuals growing up and growing old in an African American community. Writing with a delivery and dialect that are intense and unapologetically current, Scott presents characters who dare to make their own choices―choices of kindness or cruelty―in the depths of darkness and hopelessness."―Read in Colour"These are powerful stories of trying to overcome the odds when the odds are so stacked against you. [It] is a group of stories that need to be told."―Coffee and Books"As a whole, Scott's stories are well-crafted and aspects of them linger long after reading. To his credit, Scott engages the reader in circumstances that range from recognizable to foreign to almost inconceivable. These are stories of people constantly at odds, fighting to find their way. It's not a new premise, but Scott's delivery is well worth the trip."―Malcolm Avenue Review"Amilcar Scott takes a real joy in language, and his book has a stop-start flow that is delightful in its piquancy, possibly more so than a purely elegant lyrical text. Sounds, voices and the oral tradition are important, and quotes are sampled from pop culture, song lyrics, slang and sacred texts."―Berfrois"I stayed up late into the night devouring these richly drawn stories about a fictional but brightly rendered town."―Goodreads"Scott is a writer that earns a reader's trust and willingness to go wherever his stories lead. It is one of the main reasons why spending time in Cross River is so enjoyable. Check out the book now."―Michael Janairo
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