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Notes from a Black Woman's Diary

Selected Works of Kathleen Collins

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A RECOMMENDED BOOK OF 2019 FROM
Vanity Fair * Vogue * The Huffington Post

A stunning multi-cast audio collection of fiction, diary entries, screenplays, and scripts by the brilliant African-American artist and filmmaker, featuring the voices of Nina Collins, Mari, Bahni Turpin, Adenrele Ojo, January LaVoy, and Robin Miles.

Relatively unknown during her life, the artist, filmmaker, and writer Kathleen Collins emerged on the literary scene in 2016 with the posthumous publication of the short story collection Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Said Zadie Smith, "To be this good and yet to be ignored is shameful, but her rediscovery is a great piece of luck for us."

That rediscovery continues in Notes from a Black Woman's Diary, which spans genres to reveal the breadth and depth of the late author's talent. The compilation is anchored by more of Collins's short stories, which, striking and powerful in their brevity, reveal the ways in which relationships are both formed and come undone. Also collected here is the work Collins wrote for the screen and stage: the screenplay of her film Losing Ground, in which a professor discovers that the student film she's agreed to act in has uncomfortable parallels to her own life; and the script for The Brothers, a play about the potent effects of sexism and racism on a midcentury middle-class black family. And finally, it is in Collins's raw and prescient diaries that her nascent ideas about race, gender, marriage, and motherhood first play out on the page.

Kathleen Collins's writing brings to life vibrant characters whose quotidian concerns powerfully illuminate the particular joys, challenges, and heartbreaks rendered by the African-American experience. By turns empowering, exuberant, sexy, and poignant, Notes from a Black Woman's Diary is a brilliant compendium of an inimitable talent, and a rich portrait of a writer hard at work.

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    • Library Journal

      Starred review from November 15, 2018

      Prior to her death in 1988 at age 46, Collins was best known for Losing Ground (1982), one of the first American feature films produced by an African American woman. Her renown grew with the excellent posthumously published short story collection Whatever Happened to Interracial Love. Now Collins's groundbreaking work as a writer, filmmaker, activist, and educator is rapidly being recognized. This collected volume of fiction, plays, and autobiographical material, edited by Collins's daughter Lorez Collins, adds to the author's evolving reputation. Of particular interest are the short story "Nina Simone," in which two narrators discuss their own troubled relationship through the lens of the famous singer; searing commentary on race and gender in the diaries; a potent excerpt from the unfinished novel Lollie: A Suburban Tale; and the Losing Ground screenplay (including copious directorial notes by the author). VERDICT While not as eye-opening as Collins's earlier stories, this compilation will add appreciation for a talented writer whose life was cut too short as well as provide hope for the recovery of her previously unpublished work. Recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, 8/20/18.]--L.J. Parascandola, Long Island Univ., Brooklyn

      Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from January 1, 2019
      A multigenre collection of Collins' (Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, 2016) previously unpublished writing--fiction, letters, diary entries, plays, and screenplays--collected here and edited by her daughter, 30 years after the author's death."The greatest marvel of Collins's writing is that she is a magician in her use of interiority," writes Danielle Evans (Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, 2010) in the collection's introduction. "She can just slip underneath a moment of tension barely noticed by those in the world of the story and give us a character's entire interior life, but she is also a master of the moments when...all pretense drops away and the unsayable is given words and said out loud." It is, as the works here quickly demonstrate, a mastery that transcends form. The book opens with a trio of short stories, each of them centered around a woman as she is observed, followed by an excerpt from an unfinished novel, Lollie: A Suburban Tale, in which a bohemian husband and wife fight for narrative control of their marriage. It's a fight that ends prematurely; the immediate tragedy is the excerpt cuts off. The fragments from Collins' actual life--first the diary entries and then the letters--are as arrestingly clear as the fiction, small and expansive at once. Dated Sept. 9: "They're selling an old medieval house on Mason's Road, where the rooms go on endlessly, like a labyrinth. We went there on Saturday and bought five red chairs for the kitchen." And reflecting on life on an April 11: "Instead of dealing with race I went in search of love...and what I found was a very hungry colored lady." The bulk of the work here, though, are the scripts, one for her 1982 feature film, Losing Ground--a "comedy drama" about a philosophy professor who finds herself starring in a student film that hews unsettlingly close to her real life--and one for the stage play The Brothers, the story of a striving middle-class black family, told by its grieving women.Reading Collins work the same themes over again and again across mediums is a rare pleasure--as close as most of us will ever come to her spectacular mind.

      COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      NOTES is a thought-provoking audiobook best consumed slowly, leaving time for reflection on editor Nina Collins's reason for including each piece in the collection before taking in another installment. Collins, the author's daughter, says her intent is to show her mother's literary range. Each narrator provides a new experience for each literary offering, whether it's prose, an incomplete screenplay, or a letter. The well-known narrators give gravitas to the disquieting truths about a black woman's interior life. The most fascinating part of this work is the narrators' care with the plays and screenplays. Each narrator follows the author's stage directions, lending sorrow, surprise, haughtiness, and fear to the various characters. This is a work that will be listened to--even if only in parts--time and again. M.P.P. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
    • Booklist

      February 1, 2019
      The randomness of literary success is terrifying. Great writers are only recognized years after their deaths; forgotten literary works are recovered in attics and archives. What if those discoveries and rediscoveries never happened? Fortunately for posterity, Kathleen Collins, author of the short story collection, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love, finally published in 2016, has been justly rescued from obscurity. Collins, who died of breast cancer in 1988, age 46, was prolific in several genres. This new collection highlights her strengths as dramatist, screenwriter, and short-story creator. Whether she's writing about five sisters-in-law recounting the troubled past of a color struck family, a young widow dreading that her son's demons will drive him to replicate the suicide of his father, or two women forced to confront their racial animosity at a psychic's office, Collins limns incisive portraits of artistic, intellectual Black women stretched to their limits that glimmer against a background of racism, sexism, and just plain life. A timely reclamation of a remarkable voice.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

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