Black Coffee Night: Short Stories

by Emily Schultz

A postscript to the 1990s, Emily Schultz's stories feature male and female narrators exploring issues of fidelity and sexuality, the meaning of art love and work. In the eleven stories that make up Black Coffee Night, a small-town superhero puts on his female counterpart's costume, the midnight laundromat beauty queen ages as surely as her sweaters collect more dog hair, and the little red-haired girl leaves before you can tell her you love her. Twin sisters look at life from the sidelines of the soccer field, and the future prom queen is deflowered two years before the twelfth-grade formal while the rest of the characters desperately search for dance partners for "Stairway to Heaven."

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Canada

157 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Emily Schultz is the co-founder of Joyland Magazine. Her newest novel, Little Threats, is forthcoming from GP Putnam's Sons for November 2020. Her novel, The Blondes, released in the U.S. with St. Martin’s Press and Picador, in France with Editions Asphalte, and in Canada with Doubleday. It was named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR and Kirkus. The Blondes was produced as a scripted podcast starring Madeline Zima, which has also been translated into French.

Schultz's writing has appeared in Elle, Slate, Evergreen Review, Vice, Today's Parent, Hazlitt, Minola Review, Black Warrior Review, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in Brooklyn where she is a producer with the indie media company Heroic Collective.

Reviews

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 2002 collection of eleven short stories from the talented and energetic Emily Schultz.

In an homage, below is a form of found poem, comprised of the first sentence of each of the stories in order.

Black Coffee Night

The night is a saucer catching all the spills.
We were dancing for the first time in several months.
If anyone knew what kind of girl Jeanette (henceforth represented by J.) really was, they would have strung her from the flagpole of the school, J. was certain.
What does she think about when he fucks her?
The city was nothing but scaffolding that I could see straight through.
I looked really good that year.
Everywhere I looked people were crying.
There is the world around me, and then, there is the world inside my head.
The first thing I learned both backwards and forwards was the Lord's Prayer.
There is something both comforting and unsettling about knowing your death is arriving.
The first time I met Josh he was talking about self-love—masturbation really.

My copy of this book is inscribed "May 2004. For George, the dirtiest geek in Vancouver."

Even I have to wonder what I might have done to earn that inscription!

[ashleigh vaughan-evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved these stories through my late teens and early twenties.