RaveUSA Today...a bleak and beautiful collection of short stories ... This remarkable literary project, with its echoes of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, or more recently Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage, makes use of place as a deeply significant factor in characters’ lives ... Scott’s stories are often told in first person, from the point of view of men whose different voices and different eras come to form a chorus of black life in Cross River. Dialogue is rendered without quotation marks, a technique that leads to fluent slippage between what the characters think and what they say ... Reading The World Doesn’t Require You is an immersive, slightly disorienting experience. The book’s stories change modes, one after another – realism to science-fiction to horror and back, leaving readers captivated but also intentionally off-balance. Painful and shocking moments of racism and violence occur next to scenes of tenderness and humor.
Scott demonstrates the skill and long-range vision of a writer we need right now. The World Doesn’t Require You requires a commitment from readers, one that will be greatly repaid in literary satisfaction.
