The Last Suspicious Holdout - by Ladee Hubbard (Paperback)

About the Book

"The critically acclaimed author of The Rib King returns with an eagerly anticipated collection of interlocking short stories including the title story written exclusively for this volume, that explore relationships between friends, family and strangers in a Black neighborhood over fifteen years."--

Book Synopsis

"Fiercely intelligent, warm in their own way, and absolutely absorbing. . . . Excellent excellent excellent."--Roxane Gay

"Ladee Hubbard is a true original, and this book is a unique beauty."--Mary Gaitskill

The critically acclaimed author of The Rib King returns with an eagerly anticipated collection of interlocking short stories including the title story written exclusively for this volume, that explore relationships between friends, family and strangers in a Black neighborhood over fifteen years.

The thirteen gripping tales In The Last Suspicious Holdout, the new story collection by award-winning author Ladee Hubbard, deftly chronicle poignant moments in the lives of an African American community located in a "sliver of southern suburbia." Spanning from 1992 to 2007, the stories represent a period during which the Black middle-class expanded while stories of "welfare Queens," "crack babies," and "super predators" abounded in the media. In "False Cognates," a formerly incarcerated attorney struggles with raising the tuition to keep his troubled son in an elite private school. In "There He Go," a young girl whose mother moves constantly clings to a picture of the grandfather she doesn't know but invents stories of his greatness. Characters spotlighted in one story reappear in another, providing a stunning testament to the enduring resilience of Black people as they navigate the "post-racial" period The Last Suspicious Holdout so vividly portrays.

Review Quotes

"The Last Suspicious Holdout has all the ambiguous charm that its title suggests and then some. Ladee Hubbard's characters are ordinary yet mysterious. You start out thinking you know who you're reading about and what's going on and then, to paraphrase Nabokov on Gogol, it's like a trap door opens, there is a lyrical gust--and you are in a much deeper, stranger, realer place than you imagined. Ladee Hubbard is a true original, and this book is a unique beauty." - Mary Gaitskill, award-winning author, essayist, and short story writer
"Keenly observed, both in exterior details and interior psychological realities, Ladee Hubbard's short stories capture the absurd, charming, brave, beautiful, and grotesque acts that are the pivot points of specific Black lives. With prose bone spare and elegant, she reveals the swagger required to keep seeing and to be seen." - Alice Randall, author of Black Bottom Saints
"I loved these interconnected stories. They are fiercely intelligent, warm in their own way, and absolutely absorbing. Hubbard has a deft sense of character and community and I really enjoyed piecing together the connections between the collection's characters. Excellent excellent excellent." - Roxane Gay
"Hubbard's own superpower is her gift for building extraordinary worlds that examine troubled periods of America's past while shedding light on the unquestionable innovation and determination of African Americans who, perhaps improbably, thrived within them." - Los Angeles Times
"An American original." - Publishers Weekly
"An imaginative work craftily depicting the failure of imagination that is American racism." - Kirkus Reviews
"For sheer reading pleasure Ladee Hubbard's original and wildly inventive novel is in a class by itself." - Toni Morrison on The Talented Ribkins