NYC schoolteacher Fofana debuts with a short story collection set in Obama-era Harlem. Each of the eight stories centers on the life of a tenant living in the newly sold low-income apartment building, Banneker Terrace. Pressure to make rent is a stressor in the tenants' already challenging lives and a common thread running throughout. As the tenants know one another and make appearances in each other's stories, this collection begins to seem like a full-length narrative rather than individual parts. Fofana's multigenerational tenants are vivid and fully developed. Within "Ms. Dallas," for example, the unharnessed energy and group-thinking tendencies of the middle-school students are captured just as naturally as the frustration and tired incredulity of the middle-aged public-school paraprofessional. The edgy and raw language against the backdrop of the city enriches and authenticates these robust characters. The audiobook is narrated by a strong multi-actor cast, including the author, Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Nile Bullock, Dominic Hoffman, DePre Owens, André Santana, Bahni Turpin, and Jade Wheeler. Notable performances are Abbott-Pratt's narration of "Rent Manual," the author's reading of "The Okiedoke," and Hoffman's talent in "Federation for the Like-Minded." VERDICT A vibrant short story collection brimming with NYC culture and authentic characters from a debut author with an insider's perspective.--Kym Goering

Living hand-to-mouth is tiring enough, but making rent becomes especially challenging when your, Fred Doug's, Harlem apartment building, Banneker Terrace on 129th, is the next target for gentrification. The interconnected stories in Fofana's spectacular debut collection feature a range of vibrant characters who are living close to the edge. In "The Rent Manual," hairdresser Michelle Sutton counts down her earnings to rent day, hoping to cobble together a family with Swan, the father of Fortune, her lead-poisoned son. Swan is living with his sister and mother, Veronica Dallas, who works as a special-ed teacher at the middle school across the street while also clocking in part-time as as airport security official. Poverty may be pervasive, but it doesn't saturate the stories. A range of emotions, from wistfulness to humor, envy, and vengefulness, colors these pages that are often filled with laugh-out-loud passages. Emotions hang out to dry, and not much is a secret in the "long gray-ass building, twenty-five floors, three hundred suttin apartments." Above all, the characters' voices are unforgettable, crackling with energy and spunk. "Everybody got a story, everybody got a tale. Question is: is it despair or prevail?" The answers are as nuanced as the storytellers themselves, who have crafted their very own definitions of home.

The residents of a low-income high-rise apartment building in Harlem form the beating heart of Fofana's dynamic debut collection. The hardscrabble tenants of Banneker Terrace tread water while their greedy landlord imposes evictions. In "The Rent Manual," Mimi in 14D remarks on how the building houses "a little bit of everybody," including "folks with child-support payments, uncles in jail, aunties on crack, cousins in the Bloods, sisters hoein." Besides raising her young son, she desperately cobbles together the rent before late notices land on her doorstep again. In "The Okiedoke," Swan in 6B nervously awaits his friend's release from prison, while in "Camaraderie," Dary in 12H, who is gay, has high hopes for his future while doing sex work to pay the rent. Quanneisha, the former gymnast at the heart of "Tumble," also sees better things for herself. But the apartment walls are closing in on her and elderly Mr. Murray in 2E, who has been challenging passersby on the street to a game of chess on a plastic crate for decades, until he realizes the time for games is finally up. Fofana delivers the hardy, profane, violent, and passionate narration in Black English Vernacular, and finds the humanity in all his characters as they struggle to get by. These engrossing and gritty stories of tenuous living in a gentrifying America enchant. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, Massie & McQuilkin. (Aug.)

Eight interconnected stories set in a low-income Harlem high rise give faces, voices, and meaning to lives otherwise neglected or marginalized. The Banneker Terrace housing complex doesn't actually exist at present-day 129th Street and Frederick Douglass Avenue in Harlem. But the stories assembled in this captivating debut collection feel vividly and desperately authentic in chronicling diverse African American residents of Banneker poised at crossroads in their overburdened, economically constrained lives. In "The Okiedoke," a 25-year-old man named Swan is excited about the release of his friend Boons from prison; maybe too excited given that an illegal scheme they're hatching could endanger the fragile but peaceful life he's established with Mimi, the mother of his child, who's been struggling to balance waitressing at Roscoe's restaurant with doing hair on the side. Helping her learn the hairdressing trade is Dary, the "gay dude" in apartment 12H, who, in "Camaraderie," goes over-the-top in his obsession with a pop diva by getting too close to her for her comfort. "Ms. Dallas" may well be the collection's most caustically observant and poignantly tender story; the title character, Verona Dallas, besides being Swan's mother, works as a paraprofessional at the neighborhood's middle school while working nights "at the airport doin' security." Her testimony focuses mostly on the exasperating dynamics of her day job and the compounding misperceptions between the White Harvard-educated English teacher to whom she's been assigned and the unruly class he's vainly trying to interest in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. (The keen perceptions and complex characterizations in this story may be attributed to the fact that its author works as a teacher in New York City's public schools.) All these stories are told in the first-person voices of their protagonists and thus rely on urban Black dialect that may put off some readers at first, with the frequent colloquial use of the N-word and other idiomatic expressions. But those willing to use their ears more than their eyes to read along will find a rich, ribald, and engagingly funny vein of verbal music, as up-to-the-minute as hip-hop, but as rooted in human verities as Elizabethan dialogue. The publisher compares this book to Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place and Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights. One could also invoke James Joyce's Dubliners in the stories' collective and multilayered evocation of place, time, and people. A potentially significant voice in African American fiction asserts itself with wit and compassion. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.