Reading these stories, you feel as if you’re sitting with a gifted storyteller while he spins yarns about the strange people living in his mind. The prolific Mosley delights in the wonderfully bizarre ... Each protagonist seems simple and often shallow on the surface, but as the story progresses he unfurls into greater and frankly breathtaking complexity.
Since Walter Mosley published his first book, Devil in a Blue Dress, in 1990, he’s been exposing, dismantling and subverting stereotypes. Race, ethnicity, gender, class — he’s brought a fresh and discerning eye to all of them, in the midst of writing beautifully crafted fiction and thoughtful nonfiction. I can count on his books not only to engage me but to surprise me, and to make me think...He does all that again in his new short story collection ... One of the most striking things about this collection of stories is how many of them have happy ending.
Fifty-plus books into his career, Mosley hasn't run out of inspired plots, and his interest in social issues remains acute, although he editorializes with the lightest of touches; The Awkward Black Man teems with sharp, quippy dialogue and not a sentence suffers the indignity of a frill ... Leave it to a master of the crime novel like Mosley to give several stories a shocking final twist: a happy ending.
The theme of living to the fullest, regardless of how narrow that may look, animates and propels these stories in a way that expands our definition of Black manhood. Some of the results are sublime ... Some stories, involving fateful letters that change the trajectories of the protagonists’ lives, have a timeless quality that evokes both past and present masters of the story form. Others take a turn into science fiction ... These stories are thought-provoking even as they strain credulity ... correcting the canon is an ongoing effort. In the brilliant and bracing The Awkward Black Man, Mosley has given us food for the journey.
Mosley imbues each and every character with an astonishing degree of detail and genealogical backstory (often rendered within a single, almost impossibly informative sentence) that makes many of these stories read more like biographies in miniature. Each character is so fully realized as to come across as someone you could easily run into an immediately know and understand the whole of their story. It’s a remarkable achievement in any fictional narrative, made all the more so by the length constraints of the short story format ... the characters themselves remain of a piece with Mosley’s other creations throughout, existing on the page as fully fleshed out characters with lives behind and ahead of them, hopes and dreams, a rich family history and an overwhelming desire to simply make it through each day the best they possibly can. In this, Mosley’s titular 'awkwardness' can be read simple as humanity and the existential struggles contained therein.
If stories can be haunted by their own narrative, then The Awkward Black Man is a must-read for the retired ... One of the best stories in this book, 'The Letter,' explores the different degrees of life, from infidelities to suicide, and in relationships, not just with women, but between fathers and sons ... What doesn’t work are the references to race and identity. The character Laertes Jackson sounds too much like Cornel West without a suit. What can make African American literature 'awkward' is when race becomes the center of things and we only see the sun and not the moon ... The Awkward Black Man is a collection that meditates on health, aging and life. It’s the type of book that can restore one’s balance without a cane.
This wide-ranging group of Mosley characters, who are plain-speaking and sometimes comfortable, gives readers inside information about the conversations of Black life ... Mosley’s men speak and reflect in short bursts, surprising us at once with an understanding of the moment’s calamity yet with a naivete that is sure to keep them in their place ... I doubt that Walter Mosley expects readers to look for the golden lines in his stories before they settle down to get to know his men and women. That’s what some of us do, though. His characters’ smartness often boils down to just a sentence, a toss-away thought that illuminates what drives them ... The Mosley voices cover the spectrum from dumb despair to sublime wisdom, from sexual intimacy to orgasms on the Staten Island Ferry. The cities are old, and the jobs are ordinary, but he discovers ways to find some truths and show how all life can play out.
Mr. Mosley is a famous crime writer, but this collection is nearer to the recent work of Julian Barnes and Roddy Doyle, compiling vignettes and character sketches about lonely men undergoing the bewilderments of aging. In practiced, plainspoken prose, he presents a gallery of old men facing divorce, illness or perhaps some more unnamable crisis of existence ... The humble stories befit their soft-spoken antiheroes ... The collection’s representative character may be Michael Trey, who becomes a viral internet sensation by refusing to leave his apartment. This is passive resistance at its most extreme, seemingly the one recourse available to the book’s sympathetic catalog of outcasts.
... a treasury of unsung lives, vignettes of the loves of unloved, praise of people who are out of place and time but not out of mind or mortality ... Mosley expands the story for every Black man you have ever seen who seems out of step ... Without apology, the stories move into outcomes that only Black people knew to be true. These invisible men could have contributed so much if only black roses were cultivated and welcomed in the garden with all the other colors ... True to his mystery tradition, these stories are tiny murders of the soul, things that are seldom told from this point of view, showing the insight and talent of Walter Mosley.
Master storyteller Mosley has created a beautiful collection about Black men who are, indeed, awkward in their poignant humanity ... Mosley’s is an essential American voice and his portraits of Black men will have profound resonance.
[A] vibrant collection of 17 luminous stories ... A fresh commentary on diversity and racial equality ... Each entry is a testament to Mosley’s enduring literary power.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble ... eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves ... The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal ... The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
