You Are Free: Stories Paperback - 2011 - 1st Edition

"There's not much I can think of that would make me want to extend my hour-long commute ... but that's what Danzy Senna's new book You are Free did. ... Maybe it's the humanity that Senna infuses into each of her characters. Whatever "it" is would be a great topic for any book club discussion."
-Ladies' Home Journal

"Skillfully exposes the cracks in her characters' domestic lives...Though Senna's stories address race, class, and gender, they never devolve into simple case studies. Rather, her collection offers nuanced portraits of characters confronting anxieties and prejudices leaving them not as free as they would like to be."
-The New York Times Book Review

"Crisply written stories [that] take place in a middle-class world we thought we knew, while revealing the strangeness, distress, and sorrow under its blank surfaces. As with Senna's novels, racial issues crop up, but here they dodge and feint through women's lives that are never as well-tended as they seem."
-The Village Voice

"Daring...this risk taking author tackles her greatest creative challenge so far...In eight lyrical stories, Senna gives us messy mothers and daughters struggling with issues of race, identity, and finding and defining one's truth."
-Essence

"Senna reveals things about people that we rarely see in day-to-day life. ...Severing readers from their entrenched moralities usually takes a lot longer (at least a novel), but [she] does it in a few carefully chosen details."
-The Los Angeles Times

"Danzy Senna trains her gimlet eye on the intersection of race and family life, and the result is a richly nuanced, often funny, always provocative work of art."
-Jennifer Egan

"Danzy Senna's probing and marvelous stories delve into the deepest layers of the human heart and psyche, all while showing us a multi-colored, multi-flavored, and most importantly multi-layered world to which we all--lovers, mothers, nomads, strangers--could easily belong."
-Edwidge Danticat

"Danzy Senna's stories are beautiful examples of deceptive simplicity, which of course isn't simplicity at all. The tales are seductive, lucid dispatches from contemporary life, but the undercurrents are electric and strange, and go on working changes on you after the book is closed."
-Jonathan Lethem

"Searingly smart and profoundly satisfying ... These women and men are palpable and so well wrought that one loses the sense that one is reading a book."
-Richard Bausch

"One hell of a book."
-Victor LaValleEND

Danzy Senna is the author of five previous books, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, New People. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.