Company
Stories
by Shannon Sanders
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Pub Date Oct 03 2023 | Archive Date Sep 30 2023
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Description
WINNER OF THE 2023 LOS ANGELES TIMES ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 WILLIAM SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITING
A richly detailed, brilliantly woven debut collection about the lives and lore of one Black family, named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2023
Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, Company tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.
Each piece includes a moment when a guest arrives at someone’s home. In “The Good, Good Men,” two brothers reunite to oust a “deadbeat” boyfriend from their mother’s house. In “The Everest Society,” the brothers’ sister anxiously prepares for a home visit from a social worker before adopting a child. In “Birds of Paradise,” their aunt, newly promoted to university provost, navigates a minefield of microaggressions at her own welcome party. And in the haunting title story, the provost’s sister finds her solitary life disrupted when her late sister’s daughter comes calling.
These are stories about intimacy, societal and familial obligations, and the ways inheritances shape our fates. Buoyant, somber, sharp, and affectionate, this collection announces a remarkable new voice in fiction.
Advance Praise
“Company is a story collection that eats like a novel. Each story feels like a completely different vision of the same majestically sprawling family, as these neurotic high achievers struggle to balance the duties of kinship, social appearances, and honesty to their true selves. Reading Shannon Sanders makes me want to visit home.”—Tony Tulathimutte
“Company introduces an unforgettable cast of characters who remind us that family can be both wound and salve. Sanders offers sharp and original insight into the intimate politics of race and class and the impossible rules we’ve inherited to navigate them. This is a brilliant and immaculate debut.”—Danielle Evans
“If love is a many-splendored thing, family love is a little more complex. The extended clan Shannon Sanders conjures in Company is fully alive—and very funny!—recognizable but wholly new, and to read their stories is to get the gift you don’t always get from your own family: the feeling of being seen.”—Will Allison
Marketing Plan
National publicity campaign
Bookseller outreach campaign
3-city book tour
Targeted digital and social media advertising
National publicity campaign
Bookseller outreach campaign
3-city book tour
Targeted digital and social media advertising
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781644452516 |
| PRICE | $27.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 208 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Renee D, Reviewer
Since I'm not normally drawn to short stories, I specifically chose Company by Shannon Sanders because Sanders is an award-winning short story writer and attorney! They say attorneys can make great writers and this is certainly true in the case of Sanders.
The stories circle around a large, extended family including a matriarch, adult children, aunties and nieces and nephews. I really enjoyed how gently one notices the stories are connected. They are all separate, slices of life vignettes, and a family member or a handful are somewhere in the story.
A few of the stories rise to the top for me. I really enjoyed Bird of Paradise which centers around one of the adult children earning a promotion and her boss holding a little celebration party for her at his house. She invites her 2 nieces to attend with her - they are young adults - and buys dresses for them to wear.
Later in the book, you're dropped into that party again, in the story La Belle Hottentote, but this time from the nieces' perspective. What a surprise and delight! I highly recommend this book and will be looking for others from Shannon Sanders.
I
Jessica S, Bookseller
The characters in Company feel like family. So much of this feels like my own memories, like it wasn't something I read in a book but truly experienced. Sanders deftly puts previously indescribable emotions into words. This is easily one of the best story collections I'll read this year.
Natalie G, Reviewer
I really enjoyed the stories in Company. The stories were about an extended family, told through various perspectives. I liked how the stories were interconnected.
Rusty S, Educator
I love these stories! I love stories about families and their complexities. This book delivered! There are several stories that I can't wait to revisit and read again!
Librarian 17146
These stories were great and I appreciate them more for having read them as a collection- each reaches out to the others and together they reach out to the reader, sometimes funny, sometimes creepy, sometimes sad, and sometimes maddening…you know, life…
Reviewer 205760
Company is such an apt title for this collection, because that is exactly what its stories give us: time in the company of its characters, varied and interesting as they all are. Something about these slice-of-life stories feels like being at a family function, and I mean that in the best way possible: catching up with people you haven't heard from in a while, getting the 411 on who did what to whom, what happened with whom, who was wrong or right about what. There are old and young characters, brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts and cousins. Families offer so much narrative material to explore, and Company is a real testament to that. That there is a family tree in the beginning of this collection tells you all that you need to know about it. It's a collection rooted in this family tree, its interest in the ways its various branches relate to each other, in major and minor ways, directly and peripherally.
We find the characters of Company, too, in very specific moments in time: at a party to celebrate a new position as dean of a college, in the kitchen preparing food for an early Christmas dinner, at a mother's house to celebrate her birthday. And it is precisely the specificity of these moments, these carefully calibrated scenes, that allows us to get to know these characters well: how they position themselves with respect to the characters around them (ingratiating? antagonistic? wary?), how they present (or intend to present) themselves, what their priorities are, what they notice and don't notice. This is all made possible by Sanders's confident and perceptive writing, its wryness lending the stories both their sharp insight and their wit and sense of humour. And in a collection that is so centered around its characters, Sanders is able to embody the idiom of each of her characters so effectively. Some stories take only one character's point of view, while others with more ensemble casts move fluidly between each character's voice--throughout all the stories, though, each character feels distinctly like *themselves*.
Altogether, a great collection that I really enjoyed. My favourite stories were: "La Belle Hotentote," "Amicus Curiae," and "Birds of Paradise."
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