Escoffery, Jonathan

Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for fiction, the 2020 ASME Award for fiction, and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, and Agni, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020 and elsewhere. In his debut linked story collection, If I Survive You: Stories (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux), it’s the 1970s and Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston, Jamaica. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Yet even as things fall apart, the family, excluded from society as Black immigrants, remains motivated by what the couple’s younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.” Trelawny struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. If I Survive You unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness.