Neighbors and Other Stories

The most beloved corner of my personal library belongs to short story collections. There’s something special about the intimacy of short stories, bringing us so close to worlds and people not our own. And that is exactly what Neighbors and Other Stories does. These stories record the mundane horrors but also moments of respite and conviviality experienced by Black people within the Jim Crow era from the perspective of someone who experienced it.

This window into a bygone era can be a challenging read at times. But it is hard to look away, and we shouldn’t. This is our history and inheritance, a time and culture that continues to reverberate today. Each story provides a different angled view on the texture and sound of this period and its racial order. One story follows a woman abandoned by her husband who must make an arduous journey to the hospital. Another follows a Black family who secludes themselves deep in a forest in an attempt to find safety. Or there is the upstairs-downstairs story of two very different Black families connected nonetheless by marriage. Together this collection forms a troubling but beautifully rendered tapestry.

Diane Oliver died tragically at age 22 without having seen these stories published. This is their first time being shared with a wide audience and what a gift to our present. They are evocative, incisive, and deeply humane. It is a collection that I’m so glad to have added to my shelves, and you should follow suit.

A remarkable talent far ahead of her time, Diane Oliver died in 1966 at the age of 22, leaving behind these crisply told and often chilling tales that explore race and racism in 1950s and 60s America. In this first and only collection by a masterful storyteller finally taking her rightful place in the canon, Oliver’s insightful stories reverberate into the present day.

There’s the nightmarish “The Closet on the Top Floor” in which Winifred, the first Black student at her newly integrated college, starts to physically disappear; “Mint Juleps not Served Here” where a couple living deep in a forest with their son go to bloody lengths to protect him; “Spiders Cry without Tears” in which a couple, Meg and Walt, are confronted by prejudices and strains of interracial and extramarital love; and the high tension titular story that follows a nervous older sister the night before her little brother is set to desegregate his school.

These are incisive and intimate portraits of African American families in everyday moments of anxiety and crisis that look at how they use agency to navigate their predicaments. As much a social and historical document as it is a taut, engrossing collection, Neighbors is an exceptional literary feat from a crucial once-lost figure of letters.