Streetlights: 2illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience

Nearly every one of the pieces in this hefty anthology--50 short stories and excerpts from novels, most of them original to this volume--not only lives up to the title's promise to ""illuminate urban black experience"" but goes way beyond it, into the more difficult, unmapped, trans-racial regions of intensely personal joy, sadness and ambivalence. The authors represented here, including Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange and Terry McMillan, are luminaries on the American literary scene. The stories range in focus from late editor Austin's own somber ""Room 1023,"" about a divorced middle-class woman facing homelessness, to Carolyn Ferrell's buoyant ""Can You Say My Name?"" about teenage girls choosing whether to ""`have babies or become junior year cheerleaders,'"" to Elizabeth Nunez's stirring excerpt from Beyond the Limbo Silence, about a girl leaving her family in Trinidad to come to Wisconsin on a college scholarship. Throughout, these stories share a concern with how the American city--whether it's New York, Los Angeles or Little Rock--treats and mistreats its citizens of color. Though the range of American cities represented could be far broader, the strength and interest of this collection are that no single political agenda dominates. Artfulness in storytelling, sensitivity to language and metaphor are highly developed here, putting the aesthetic and the political truly side by side. (May)