"If I Survive You is a collection of connected short stories that reads like a novel, that reads like real life, that reads like fiction written at the highest level." —Ann Patchett
"Kaleidoscopic, urgent, hilarious, revelatory and like nothing you've read before." —Marlon James • "A ravishing debut." —The New Yorker
Belletrist's September pick. A September 2022 IndieNext Pick, and named a Best Book of September by Amazon and Apple Books. Named a Most Anticipated Book by The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Good Morning America, Buzzfeed, the Los Angeles Times, TIME, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Shondaland, Real Simple, Kirkus, The Root, The Millions, and Literary Hub.
A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller.
In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”
Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper—himself reckoning with his failures as a parent and his longing for Jamaica—Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net.
Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful.
BIO
Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Passages North, Zyzzyva, and Electric Literature, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing. He received his MFA from the University of Minnesota, is a PhD fellow in the University of Southern California’s PhD in Creative Writing and Literature Program, and in 2021 was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. If I Survive You is his debut book.
REVIEWS
"[Escoffery] is, throughout, a gifted, sure-footed storyteller, with a command of evocative language and perfectly chosen details . . . Perhaps most important, he wields a disarming, irreverent sense of humor . . . [If I Survive You] makes me eager to read him for a long time to come." --Andrew Martin, The New York Times Book Review
"A ravishing debut . . . There’s peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism. The book feels thrillingly free . . . [Escoffery's] stories also stress the ebullience, the possibility, that can emerge from in-betweenness.” --Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
"Not since Moby Dick has the all-American ethos of 'sink or swim' on your own been dramatized to such devastating effect. If I Survive You is an extraordinary debut collection, an intensively granular, yet panoramic depiction of what it's like to try to make it — or not — in this kaleidoscopic madhouse of a country." --Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
"Jonathan Escoffery’s radiant collection of linked stories, If I Survive You, may well be the buzziest debut of 2022. . . . In crystalline prose, Escoffery evokes the fluorescent textures of Miami, tapping Caribbean traditions, immigrant aspirations, and familial and communal bonds." --Hamilton Cain, OprahDaily
"Short stories, ideally, evoke a heightened sense of attention: Crystallized more fully than novels, they allow the breadth of a focused stretch of time, with its layers and textures, to reveal itself. At their best, Escoffery’s stories do this, looping the reader into the heartbreak of fatherly rejection, into the desperation of needing just another 20 bucks . . . [If I Survive You] promise[s] more from a writer I can’t wait to see making books for a long, long time to come." --Lynn Steger Strong, Los Angeles Times
[H] MCD / September 6, 2022
0.96" H x 8.47" L x 5.76" W (0.85 lbs) 272 pages