Dances

December 1, 2022

In Nigerian British author Agbaje-Williams's auction-hot The Three of Us, a heretofore contented wife discovers the acrimony between her husband and best friend as they dance around her for first place in her attention (75,000-copy first printing). Inaugural winner of the Chautauqua Janus Prize, Cuffy structures Dances according to the basics of ballet as her Black heroine rises to become a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet while struggling with personal issues. From a staff writer at New York magazine's "The Strategist," Denton-Hurst's Homebodies features a young Black woman fired from her media job who writes a scorching denunciation of the racism and sexism she encountered in the business that goes viral (75,000-copy first printing). In Pushcart Prize-nominated Neal's Notes on Her Color a young Black Indigenous woman gifted with the ability to change the color of her skin finds self-respect (and a means of escaping crushing family expectations) with a queer, dark-skinned piano instructor. In What Napoleon Could Not Do, from Ghanian-born Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Nnuro, Ghanian computer programmer Jacob can't win permission from the U.S. government to move to Virginia to be with his wife while Jacob's sister Belinda is married to a wealthy Black Texan who tries to apprise Jacob of the country's deep-seated racism (50,000-copy first printing). Drawn from her family's experience, Pushcart Prize-winning Oza's A History of Burning opens with Pirbhai's being taken from India to work on the East African Railway for the British and moves toward the expulsion of his descendants from Uganda in 1972 (50,000-copy first printing)

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Starred review from March 13, 2023
An African American ballerina battles racial profiling and personal demons in Cuffy’s brilliant debut novel (after the chapbook Atlas of the Body). At 22, Celine “Cece” Cordell gets the biggest break of her career when she’s promoted to principal dancer at the New York City Ballet. Surrounded by white dancers, she is immediately considered a trailblazer by the media. The newfound attention is spoiled, though, after her lover and fellow troupe dancer cheats on her with another performer just as Cece learns she is unexpectedly pregnant. Then, her beloved yet troubled older brother, Paul, who first encouraged her dancing, goes missing. Paul has struggled with a drug addiction, and Cece, fearing he might have died, travels to South Carolina to find him. A ballet dancer herself, Cuffy brings grace, control, and vigor to her prose. Through Cece’s trials, the story movingly explores the secrets and inner demons of a performer who struggles with artistic competition, betrayal, guilt, family, and “the ever-present weight” of her race. Indeed, as Cece acknowledges, “the ballet body is an intimidating mystique.” Readers will be enchanted. Agent: Heather Carr, Friedrich Agency.

Starred review from March 15, 2023
A gifted Black ballerina, soaring in her career, is held back by inner demons and troubled relationships. "Ballet has always been about the body. The white body, specifically. So they watched my Black body, waited for it to confirm their prejudices, grew ever more anxious as it failed to do so, again and again." At 22, Celine Cordell is about to defy expectations by becoming the first Black female principal in the history of the New York City Ballet. As the pressure mounts, the media attention intensifies, and fans begin doing things like naming their labradoodles after her, she's clearly made serious headway against institutional racism--it's her troubled heart that's holding her back now. Her relationship with Jasper, her White ballet partner, doesn't come close to filling her emotional needs, but she's grown distant from her disapproving mother and hasn't seen her beloved, drug-addicted brother in five years. With her lifelong best friend having vaporized into a consuming love affair, Cece faces the biggest challenges of her life alone. Cuffy's debut is enriched by her deep knowledge of ballet, expressed in sentences that swoop, surge, and flow as if choreographed. "Rond de jambe, the foot sweeping graceful half circles into the floor, and fondus and d�velopp�s, the legs growing long now, delicious bloom in the hips and the inner thighs." She also vividly creates the dancer's inner world, with its extremes of discipline and self-consciousness. "Hunger is a type of want I find unsettling. Especially when it's this intense, this much of a threat to my self-control....I bet Irine isn't hungry right now. I bet Gwen is having a Clif Bar for lunch. I feel like I could take down a giraffe and then mount Jasper for dessert." The closest thing most of us will ever experience to actually dancing the ballet and to life in a dancer's body.

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