Escoffery's Surprising Stories of Desperation

Escoffery’s fiction is marked by ingenuity. The eight stories in “If I Survive You” employ the first, second, and third person, as well as the past, present, and future tense. One tale unfolds in Jamaican patois; another dips in and out of Black American idioms. There’s peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism. The book feels thrillingly free, and Escoffery, forty-one, has caught the publishing world’s attention: in 2020, he won the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a National Magazine Award.