2024 PEN/Faulkner Award (nominee)
2023 Kirkus Prize for Fiction (finalist)
A Must-Read at The New York Times, NPR, Los Angeles Times, Vulture, The Boston Globe, Shondaland, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Chicago Review of Books, Essence, Literary Hub, The Millions, The Root
“Exhilarating . . . Brinkley is a writer whose versatility knows no boundaries . . . A gift of the highest quality.” —Mateo Askaripour, The New York Times Book Review
From National Book Award finalist Jamel Brinkley, Witness is an elegant, insistent narrative of actions taken and not taken.
What does it mean to really see the world around you—to bear witness? And what does it cost us, both to see and not to see?
In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters—from children to grandmothers to ghosts—live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect with, stand up for, care for, and remember one another, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape their futures as well as the legacies and prospects of their communities and their city.
In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, and the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations, where strangers might sometimes show kindness while those we trust—doctors, employers, siblings—too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill, dancing in the street, glimpsing your purpose, change on the horizon.
With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city.
Genre: Literary Fiction
“Exhilarating . . . Brinkley is a writer whose versatility knows no boundaries . . . A gift of the highest quality.” —Mateo Askaripour, The New York Times Book Review
From National Book Award finalist Jamel Brinkley, Witness is an elegant, insistent narrative of actions taken and not taken.
What does it mean to really see the world around you—to bear witness? And what does it cost us, both to see and not to see?
In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters—from children to grandmothers to ghosts—live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect with, stand up for, care for, and remember one another, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape their futures as well as the legacies and prospects of their communities and their city.
In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, and the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations, where strangers might sometimes show kindness while those we trust—doctors, employers, siblings—too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill, dancing in the street, glimpsing your purpose, change on the horizon.
With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"In Witness, Jamel Brinkley explores the longings and fears of his characters with a tenderness and generosity of spirit that makes the reader hurt when they hurt, and rejoice in life's surprising moments of joy alongside them. He renders worlds both familiar and new with precision and clarity, showing the many ways that place has the power to mark people, whether they be young boys, old men or the people society pushes to its margins. Read Witness and allow yourself the pleasure of seeing the world as Brinkley sees it." - Angela Flournoy
"Brinkley's sentences are daggers. He writes about the shifting intimacies of community and love with wit and warmth." - Raven Leilani
"Jamel Brinkley is one of the best story writers we have. Witness is a book of psychological acuity, of graceful sentences, of devastation and heart. Read everything this man writes, and know the world anew." - Justin Torres
"Jamel Brinkley reminds one of iconic short-story writers Edward P. Jones and Mavis Gallant. His characters, full of mysteries and secrets, do not strive to be something larger than life, nor do they allow themselves to be reduced into categorizable and explicable figures. Each story in Witness brings a novel's worth of richness and complexity. This is a dazzling collection by a masterful storyteller." - Yiyun Li
"Brinkley's sentences are daggers. He writes about the shifting intimacies of community and love with wit and warmth." - Raven Leilani
"Jamel Brinkley is one of the best story writers we have. Witness is a book of psychological acuity, of graceful sentences, of devastation and heart. Read everything this man writes, and know the world anew." - Justin Torres
"Jamel Brinkley reminds one of iconic short-story writers Edward P. Jones and Mavis Gallant. His characters, full of mysteries and secrets, do not strive to be something larger than life, nor do they allow themselves to be reduced into categorizable and explicable figures. Each story in Witness brings a novel's worth of richness and complexity. This is a dazzling collection by a masterful storyteller." - Yiyun Li
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