Some of Them Will Carry Me - by Giada Scodellaro (Paperback)

About the Book

"A fiercely original debut collection centers Black women in moments of imminent change. [The author's] stories range in length, style, and tone-a collage of social commentary, surrealism, recipes, folklore, and art. What brings them together is a focus on experiences of black women in moments of dislocation, and a cinematic prose style saturated with detail: a child's legs bent upon the small bosom of their mother, three-piece suits floating in a river, a man holding a rotting banana during sex, wet cardboard, a woman walking naked through a traffic tunnel. In language that is lyrical, minimal, and often absurd, the diverse stories in [the book] deconstruct contemporary life while building a surprising new reality of language, intimacy, and loss"--

Book Synopsis

"This is a book of wonders, full of intricate beauty, and Giada Scodellaro is an extraordinary talent." --Katie Kitamura

Giada Scodellaro's debut is a fiercely original collection of stories ranging in length, style, and tone--a collage of social commentary, surrealism, recipes, folklore, art-- that centers Black women in moments of imminent change. In language that is lyrical, minimal, and often absurd, the diverse stories in Some of Them Will Carry Me deconstruct intimacy while building a surprising, unnerving new reality of language, culture, consumption, and loss.

Review Quotes

"The female protagonists who appear in Scodellaro's kinetic début collection of stories find themselves in absurdist and fantastical scenarios that interrogate the nature of subjectivity." --The New Yorker, "The Best Books of 2022"

"Scodellaro debuts with a wild and wonderful collection of surreal and enigmatic accounts of sex, relationships, and encounters with strangers. . . . It's an auspicious and consistently surprising first outing." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"These are Black characters whose existence in their surreal landscape is as natural as the soft mentions of cocoa butter on thighs. A world immediately recognizable even in its strangeness. A world confident in and of itself. These are the soft and fragrant spaces of the dreams of Black writers and readers alike. The wholeness of the marginalized existence, what it is like inside the body and inside the love when not viewed from the outside." --Georgie Fehringer, The Rumpus

"Some of Them Will Carry Me contains thirty-five stories, none like the last. Many are short: gut-punches and tilt-a-whirls and cold plunges. They are immersive, rapid experiences with an impact disproportionate to their length." --Maggie Lange, Purse Book Newsletter

"An enthralling, brilliant debut collection of stories that vary in length but are equal in craft. . . . Scodellaro questions assumptions and conjures questions--of belonging and of allowance. She writes the same nature of delicate and meandering autofiction that has long been the domain of white writers, reorienting the reader to narrators that are detached and yet wholly present, whose identities inform their observation and ultimate remarks. A stunning collection from a promising singular new talent." --Meghana Kandlur, Open Books (Chicago)

"This debut collection is not to be missed. Some as short as a paragraph, or even a sentence, Scodellaro's stories capture a broad spectrum of life's joy, disgust, complexity, and unusual specificity that yet contains multitudes . . . Readers encountering this extraordinary book for the first time will rejoice." --Booklist, Starred Review

"This is a book of wonders, full of intricate beauty, and Giada Scodellaro is an extraordinary talent." --Katie Kitamura

"In Some of Them Will Carry Me, Giada Scodellaro enthralls as she evokes the best of the lushly slow and quiet European films of the 1960s, with their long, wide, starkly gorgeous shots, deeply detached yet viscerally sensual plotlines, and lonely meandering figures crossing landscapes. But what is more powerful is how she reorganizes those canonized spaces to foreground the subjectness of brown bodies and to imbue her female characters with volition. It's a virtuosic reframing, done with seductive and disarming brevity. A stunning debut." --Renee Gladman

"Riveting, evocative, written with intensity and purpose, these potent, self-contained fictions have a vitality all their own--and they announce the arrival of a brilliant new voice in literature." --Alexandra Kleeman

About the Author

Giada Scodellaro is a writer and photographer born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, NY. She holds an MFA from the New School. Some of Them Will Carry Me is her first book.