Published: 08/12/2016
ISBN: 9781783783427
Granta Books
192 pages

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

Kathleen Collins

It is the long, hot summer of 1963 and New York is filled with lovers, dreamers and protestors. Young African-American women grow out their hair and discover the taste of new freedoms. Young men, white and black, travel south to fight against segregation, praying for a society in which love is colour-free. Written in the late 1960s and early 1970s but overlooked in Kathleen Collins’s lifetime, these stories mark the debut of a masterful writer whose electrifying voice was almost lost to history.

An exceptional writer... To be this good and yet to be ignored is shameful, but her rediscovery is a great piece of luck, for us... I adored this book

Zadie Smith

Modern, confident, emotionally intelligent and humorous... Persistently delightful... [Collins's] stories seem fresh and distinctive [and] startlingly prescient

Colin Grant, Guardian

Lithe and passionate... distinguished by Collins's rich, voluptuous prose... [These stories] are as urgent today as they ever could have been

Edmund Gordon, Sunday Times

The Author

Born in New Jersey in 1942, Kathleen Collins was an activist during the Civil Rights Movement who went on to carve out a career for herself as a playwright and filmmaker during a time when black women were rarely seen in those roles. Though she is now considered a pioneer, Collins’s work was overlooked and forgotten till 2015 when her film Losing Groundpremiered at the Lincoln Center as part of a series on African-American filmmakers, and was hailed as a masterpiece. She died in 1988, aged just 46.

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