So many masterfully written small worlds explored here. Thoughtful and meaningful and lovely. I loved the writing most of all and look forward to seeking out this author's work in the future.

Not taking actio is never a good thing. When people’s lives intersect and bad things happen there are actions to be taken. Brinkley challenges readers to stand up and not accept the bad things. Really enjoyed how the author brings together real issues, stories, and moral quandaries, and systemic injustice. Definitely a must read.

An alert and stunning collection.. so many good quotes here
"Others said he had been tracked down by a. very distant relative and was living in Louisiana among his people, if it's possible for near strangers to be your people."

"We left the rescue and walked shoulder to shoulder to shoulder and so on, incandescent with jokes and laughter, five lit bulbs on a string. "

"making it gorgeous as hell with our signing and our shouts and the perfectly synchronized dance steps we devised right there on the spot."

"wearing a stiff plaid vest, which jumped on his body like an ill-fitting shell."

Brinkley is deserving of all the praise he's received.

each of these stories burnish to a point in an incredibly satisfying way. each one better than the last. honestly thrilled to have read them.

“She learns my names too, and I learn that there are more of them than I knew, names for someone who is filth, someone who is base, someone who isn't fit to exist, or who doesn't exist at all. We play our roles. We learn each other's secret names, and say them, but neither of us learns the reasons they exist. We don't say if there are any, beyond the kink itself, beyond the raw pleasure of play. Maybe, in her case, there aren't any reasons. I guess it's possible that there aren't any in mine.”

tysm to netgalley for this rockin arc

What lushness, what beauty - Jamel Brinkley is an astonishing writer capturing both the incredibly intimate and the widely experienced human experience. Witness provides an excellent source text for individual short story teaching, for a classroom library, or for a thematic unit on contemporary and identity-forming writing.

A book comprised of short stories about what it means to bear witness. I got about 40% of the way through the book before I realized this book was not the right match for me.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for this eARC.

Witness Stories is a collection of nine short stories by Jamel Brinkley, a writer who explores the lives of Black men and boys in America with nuance, compassion, and insight. The stories are set in various locations, from Brooklyn to the Bronx, from California to the Caribbean, and span different time periods, from the 1960s to the present day. The characters in these stories grapple with issues such as identity, masculinity, family, love, violence, and trauma, often witnessing or experiencing events that shape their lives in profound ways.

Brinkley’s prose is elegant and engaging, capturing the voices and emotions of his characters with authenticity and sensitivity. He creates vivid scenes and atmospheres, whether it is a barbershop, a college campus, a dance hall, or a funeral. He also skillfully weaves in elements of history, culture, and politics, showing how they affect the personal and social realities of his characters. Brinkley does not shy away from the complexities and contradictions of human nature, but rather embraces them, revealing the hopes, fears, dreams, and regrets of his characters with honesty and empathy.

Witness Stories is a powerful and compelling debut by Jamel Brinkley, a writer who demonstrates a remarkable talent for storytelling and a keen understanding of the human condition. The stories in this collection are not only entertaining and moving, but also illuminating and thought-provoking, offering a glimpse into the lives of Black men and boys in America that is rarely seen in mainstream literature. Witness Stories is a book that deserves to be read, discussed, and celebrated by readers of all backgrounds and interests.

A really complete, impressive, enjoyable collection. Just days after finishing, I had already successfully recommended to two people!

These stories are so rich they need to be kept short. A full-length novel of each would be emotionally overwhelming, and quite possibly not have the same impact. I read each in it's turn, and put the book down to reflect.

What is a witness? A witness has seen something and thus personally carries the evidence, the visual proof. Firsthand experience becomes knowledge, stored in one’s wits (a witless person can’t be a witness), knowledge that can be shared with others. Fundamentally, a witness is someone who can testify, provide a testimony—whether in a courtroom or in a church. In his new story collection, Jamel Brinkley takes a cue from James Baldwin (that other J. B.), who, in an epigraph, observes that there’s a fine line between a witness and an actor.

And a writer, one could add. The choice of the title Witness is an interesting one. It is also the title of the last of the ten pieces in this collection, and that story (first published in The Paris Review in 2020) is perhaps the strongest. So it could be that this is “Witness and Other Stories.” But acts of witnessing appear all across this book, often explicitly labeled as such—from the “living witnesses” of ghosts and paranormal phenomena to a young man’s impression of his late cousin’s conversion from a talented dancer to a drunk dancer: “It’s a scary thing to witness, this transformation of laughter, from an expression of joy you’re helpless against into a weapon deliberately honed and hurled.”

It’s tempting to read Brinkley’s book as a conceptual meditation, something akin to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. In one story here, “Comfort,” a young woman named Simone struggles to process the death of her brother, who—according to the court’s official narrative—somehow managed to shoot himself in the head while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. Aside from the arresting officer, who was found not guilty, there were no witnesses.

But the collection is a much more capacious set of observations regarding the lives of Brinkley’s compelling characters, most of whom live in and around Brooklyn. (The Bed–Stuy neighborhood is the gravitational center of the book.) In fact, what’s most impressive about this work is the multiplicity of perspectives. Stories are told in the past tense and in the present tense. They are conveyed in first-person narration and in third-person narration—and, in one tale (“Blessed Deliverance”), in third-person plural narration (“we”), a technique that blends the voices of five different teenage friends. Privileged perspectives include both those of children and those of adults, those of men and those of women.

Many of Brinkley’s stories feature young or middle-aged men (the author himself is 47), but the most powerful characters in the book are older women. In “The Let-Out,” a young man meets an attractive older woman only to discover, to his horror, that she is the mistress with whom his father once ran away. In “Arrow,” a man’s deceased mother remains in the house as a ghost—and even has sex with her living husband! (The narrator is relatively unsurprised: “According to the terms of her personal lexicon, a woman was a lady only if she was fascinating and ungovernable, and my mother considered herself nothing if not a lady.”) In “That Particular Sunday,” Aaron recalls a childhood visit to a mental hospital, where he learns that he has an additional, institutionalized aunt—and where he hears her unforgettable laughter.

Most memorable is Anita, through whom the narration is focalized in “Bystander,” one of the strongest stories in Witness. The fastidious Anita is disappointed in her unambitious teenage daughter, Dandy, upon whom she forces weight-gain drinks to combat what she fears is an eating disorder. But Dandy, her family discovers, actually has a rare genetic disorder, and Anita’s special drinks have gradually been poisoning her, leading to hospitalization. Is Anita a bad mother? How had she not noticed her daughter’s illness? The doctor speaks to Anita in “an ambivalent tone, both censure and congratulation.” On the one hand, Anita’s homemade “cocktails” nearly gave her daughter a lethal heart attack; on the other hand, they exacerbated Dandy’s rare symptoms enough to secure the diagnosis that will now keep her alive. “It was conceivable to say she had saved Dandy’s life, and it was conceivable as well to say she had nearly killed her.”

This complicated emotional response—what a character in another story refers to as a mix of “gratitude and resentment”—is a hallmark of Brinkley’s technique. Anita, like many, is equally villainous and heroic. “Bystander” was originally published in The Yale Review this summer, but here, in Witness, Brinkley has slightly revised it to bring out Anita’s voice and really get inside her head. It’s a notable improvement to an already excellent story.

The same could be said of the story “Witness,” which was first published in The Paris Review and is reprinted here with some light touch-ups. But those touches artfully accentuate the narration of Silas, whose sister, Bernice, might have survived an illness if only someone had taken care of her. “Witness” is superb, a work of tremendous skill and talent. If you only read one of Brinkley’s stories, start here.

The house of fiction has a million windows, wrote Henry James. The author, he thought, was a “watcher” of “the human scene.” James would have liked Brinkley, who, in Witness, has built an impressive house of fiction of his own. Little has escaped his observant eye. (“By nature, I’m an observer,” Brinkley has said.) Of course, Brinkley is no mere reporter; his characters also have remarkable depth—“chasms of psyche and memory,” in the words of reviewer Margot Lee. But he is also a respecter of surfaces, zeroing in on what others would overlook. As one of his characters points out, “So much is made about the importance of achieving depth in human interactions, but what about the delicate surface, what about the skin?”

And Brinkley is to be commended for his devotion to the short story. Publishers seem to prefer novels, and short fiction is often considered more demanding on the artist; every sentence must do its work, requiring a precision that eludes careless writers. Following his first, prize-winning collection, A Lucky Man (2018), Brinkley must have felt at least some pressure to produce a novel. But with Witness, his second collection, he has established himself as a master craftsman of the short form.

Really beautiful writing, but a bit disturbing at times. I mostly enjoyed each of the stories, and was certainly holding my breathe at times!

Great collection of short stories! If you’re into those hard-pressing, unique relationships that are exacerbated by societal power distributions, you’ll get this.

BLESSED DELIVERANCE
4.5 stars
Coming out of the gates strong I cried??
This is how of mice and men could have been! Take notes white people! Encapsulates how we treat out unhoused community members, and our friend group growing up. Listeners of Open Mike Eagle will like this.

THE LET-OUT
3.75 stars
I had to suspend my disbelief a little bit for this one, but that characters were crisp and enigmatic. Dancing, photographs, interpersonal relationships.

COMFORT
4.5 stars
Man 😭😭😭 I think this piece gets at a lot of subtleties of grief, loss, and trauma. It starts off as something so relatable—being too depressed to clean a yard, appease your landlord—and then the real scenario Simone is in is revealed, and I personally couldn’t help but feel it in my core. I also think this story’s narrative shows some really concrete things about cycles of violence—where they can and do arise.

ARROWS
3.75 stars
This one has the most poetic writing by far. It’s very smart how we’re made to go along with, but slightly dislike, the narrator. As far as short stories from one perspective go, this has the best handle on intergenerational trauma, and it’s different from a masculine perspective. What is said, versus what is felt. I think I took longer than I was supposed to, to understand how the “ghosts” were operating.
How much, if at all, is this a Hamlet reference? LOL

SAHAR
4 stars
What starts as an old lady’s weird obsession with her delivery driver evolves into a story about the loneliness epidemic personified, the conditions that enable it, and the adaptations that one makes to cope.

BYSTANDER
5 stars
Deeply upsetting.

THE HAPPIEST HOUSE ON UNION STREET
2.5 stars
I think I’m missing something crucial here? It’s difficult to write feelings and experiences from a child’s POV and make it believable and interpretable—I think that’s where I’m struggling.

THAT PARTICULAR SUNDAY
3 stars
There’s some interesting notes about the meaning of family and the experience of gender here, but I still feel like I’m missing the point.

BARTOW STATION
3.5 stars
Experiences of trauma, shame, and masculinity afoot—but what really warrants a good rating are the absolute killer one-liners that Zoelle is spitting.

WITNESS
5 stars
I don’t want to say anything so that you can go on the journey I went on. But this really got me. Part of this feels like an admission, which I find so deeply sad.

I'm very picky when it comes to short story collection and unfortunately this one didn't end up working for me. I do really like Brinkley's writing, but something about the short stories just didn't come together for me.

A collection of 10 short stories all set in New York. They were all very well written and diverse story-wise. I think it is obviously easier to connect with the places and stories when you're from New York. I liked them but I did not love them, which was because I think short stories are just not my jam really. My favourite stories from the collection were Arrows and Witness.

An interesting collection of stories that centres inferiority. With glimpses into the life of complex characters, family dynamics and friendships. There are some beautiful sentences in here and Brinkley captures emotions acute. I think the title is apt as it asks the reader to bear witness along with the characters to the changes that have been brought about on account of things such as affairs, police brutality, and also by modern life but it’s all done with subtlety.

Title: Witness Stories
Author: Jamel Brinkley
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Reviewed By: Arlena Dean
Rating: Four
Review:
"Witness Stories" by Jamel Brinkley

My Sentiments:

These were quite a collection of various stories taking place in New York City of different ten challenges from 'mental illness, tragic, dementia, old age, gentrification, failed family relationships, family conflicts, dead-end jobs, failed romances, and poverty,' all with different perspectives.

This author gave the reader some brilliant stories; each collection of short stories will give one a lot to think of long after this literary read.

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar Straus & Giroux for the ARC for the read.

Loved Jamel Brinkley’s debut A LUCKY MAN, so was looking forward to reading his latest short story collection. Titled WITNESS, it opens with a few quotes, the first of which is by James Baldwin, “I was to discover that the line which separates a witness from an actor is a very thin line indeed; nevertheless, the line is real.”

The ten stories probe into the domestic lives of characters who play on this idea of being a witness to someone else’s story. Sometimes from the perspective of someone with more skin in the game, others as peripheral observers. To witness but not be a direct participant, to be complicit in what is or isn’t happening, to be impacted by something that is bigger than you, possibly nothing to do with you. All still an important facet of the whole, caught in the radius of any implosions, either directly or conscious of its reverberations far down the line.

The ten stories are set in a changing New York, people caught up in changes that affect them just as they are a part of the change they allow, choices that might not feel like a choice at all, surrendering to forces much larger. Elegantly the everyday mundanity and complex emotionscapes of Black lives, the gentrification and racism and division growing in a city that once thrummed with the soul of its community, there is much to admire here. It was the little devastating incidents that would strike me, such as the titular story the collection ended on, already a heart-breaking one told without sentimentality, the unnecessary knife-twist by a brother who can’t admit to his own hurt, learning instead to lash it towards another. We are ultimately accountable for the choices we make, what we return to the world.

it's unsurprising that Jamel Brinkley has written yet another brilliant collection of short stores. Each story in this colleges is a hit.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC of Witness. This book did not speak to me. I felt like the stories didn’t go anywhere and were just scattered writings. Not my favorite ARC and it left me disappointed.

Binkley's ability to achieve depth of emotion and meaning in a short story is astounding. Through many of the stories in this collection, I was bale to experience a life as a different person with a different perspective and experiences who are yet grappling with common questions of identity and belonging.