“You know how white people love their history right up until it’s true,” says a character in The Office of Historical Corrections, the hotly anticipated second collection of stories from Danielle Evans. Such questions of race, history, nostalgia, and memory are the animating forces of this bravura collection, Evans’s first since 2010’s sensational Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self put her on the map as an emerging literary superstar.In these sly, spectacular stories, each one haunted by the sinister intersections of racism and misogyny, Evans interrogates the American story—and who gets to tell it. In the showstopping titular novella, a citizen army of public historians are tasked by a new government agency with remedying “the contemporary crisis of truth.” Cassie, our heroine, and Genevieve, her lifelong frenemy turned colleague, are dispatched to investigate the decades-old death of a Black man in rural Wisconsin, where they encounter a right-wing vigilante who styles himself as White Justice. In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a co-ed whose life has been sundered by grief is sucked into the maelstrom of campus cancel culture when a photograph of her in a Confederate flag bikini goes viral. In “Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want,” dozens of women wronged by a high-profile artist are invited to his ambitious new exhibition, a series of public apologies that call into question just who an apology is for. Evans illuminates a harrowing world where Black women must “audition for their lives,” and where the historical record is a… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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Danielle Evans On the Necessity—And the Consequences—Of Telling the Truth About History
