Watching one of your favorite writers hone their craft is an amazing thing.
It was one thing when Barracoon was published and I saw notices that Zora Neale Hurston was coming out with a new book. Since she’s been dead for decades, so that one threw me for a loop.
So you can imagine my surprise when Goodreads later told me Hurston was coming out with yet another new book!
Come on now!
It turns out Genevieve West tracked down as much of Hurston’s short fiction as she could find, including eight stories that had been believed to be lost.
These are stories that were printed in newspapers, magazines, and periodicals while Hurston was struggling to make it as a writer.
In this book, they’re arranged in the order in which they were published, although there are a few for which the original publication date can’t be known for sure so they just made their best guess.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of my all-time favorite books because the writing is so beautiful, so I was psyched to get to dive back into Hurston’s writing with this collection and it did not disappoint.
I especially love watching writers play around with form, and while they weren’t always my favorite stories, I loved seeing Hurston write stories about her contemporaries as Bible stories.
There’s even one story she wrote twice: once as a Bible story and once in the style we’ve all come to know as Hurston’s distinctive voice.
Because the stories are arranged in chronological order, the reader gets to see that voice emerge and develop as we work our way through the book.
The stories cover Hurston’s usual fare: the day-to-day life of Black people living and working in the southern United States and New York City; Black people picking up their lives in the South and moving to NYC for various reasons; couples and individuals struggling to make ends meet; couples in love; couples fighting; women trying to seduce men with varying degrees of success.
I’ve long said I don’t like short stories, but I think I have to stop saying that, especially given how much I enjoyed reading this collection.