On this week’s episode, Sidik Fofana joins us to discuss Stories From the Tenants Downstairs (Scribner, Aug. 16), a stunning collection of eight interconnected stories, each narrated by a different denizen of a fictional high-rise in Central Harlem. Debut author Fofana is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program, a 2018 Center for Fiction fellow, and a public school teacher in Brooklyn.

Here’s a bit from our starred review of Stories From the Tenants Downstairs: “The stories assembled in this captivating debut collection feel vividly and desperately authentic.… [Readers] 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.…A potentially significant voice in African American fiction asserts itself with wit and compassion.

Fofana and host Megan Labrise discuss the rap that introduces the collection; Banneker Terrace, the fictional high-rise on 129th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard where much of the book unfolds; how each story is told from the perspective of a different tenant; Mimi in 14D; Ms. Dallas in 6B; how Fofana ordered the stories; how hard it is to write a good short story; and much more.

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