內容簡介
And she was becoming frightened too, looking at all those white faces pressed against the windowpanes.
One family comes under attack as their little boy prepares to start at an all-white school. Friends plan a sit-in at the Rose Crest Tea Room, only to be arrested. A female student - always the 'Experiment' - fails to integrate at a formerly segregated college: ignored by a sea of white faces, the closet is her refuge. And when a social worker enters a family's woodland cabin - a sanctuary haunted by memories of their lost baby, and silenced son - she meets the fate of all visitors.
Tragically killed aged 22 in 1966, Diane Oliver's masterly stories resonate with renewed urgency. Steeped in the uncanny horror of everyday life for the Black community in the American South of the Jim Crow era, these chilling tales explore toxic racism and the human toll of activism for 'the cause' with heartbreaking empathy and wisdom. Depicting families whole and broken, daily injustices and life-threatening struggle, Neighbors restores a vital missing voice to the canon.
作者介紹
Diane Oliver was born in Charlotte, North Carolina and after graduating from high school, she attended Women’s College (which later became the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and was the Managing Editor of The Carolinian, the student newspaper. She published four short stories in her lifetime and three more posthumously: ‘Key to the City’ and ‘Neighbors’ published in The Sewanee Review in 1966; ‘Health Service’, ‘Traffic Jam’ and ‘Mint Juleps Not Served Here’ published in Negro Digest in 1965, 1966 and 1967 respectively; ‘The Closet on the Top Floor’ published in Southern Writing in the Sixties in 1966; and ‘“No Brown Sugar in Anybody’s Milk”’ published in The Paris Review in 2023. ‘Neighbors’ was a recipient of an O. Henry Award in 1967. Diane began graduate work at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop and was awarded the MFA degree posthumously days after her death, at the age of 22, in a motorcycle accident in 1966.
