Some of Them Will Carry Me

by Giada Scodellaro

Giada Scodellaro’s debut is a boldly original collection of stories ranging in length, style, and tone—a collage of social commentary, surrealism, recipes, folklore, and art—that centers Black women in moments of imminent change. This is writing grounded in observation, bordering on the voyeuristic and saturated with detail: a child’s legs bent upon the small bosom of their mother, three-piece suits floating in a river, a man holding a rotting banana during sex, a woman walking naked through a tunnel. In language that is both lyrical and spare, the diverse stories in Some of Them Will Carry Me together deconstruct intimacy while building a surprising, unnerving new reality of language, culture, and loss.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Poetry, Contemporary, Literature, Womens, Novels

184 pages, Paperback

Published October 4, 2022

About the author

Giada Scodellaro was born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, New York. Giada’s writings have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Yorker, BOMB, Harper’s, Granta, and The Chicago Review of Books, among other publications. Giada is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and is the inaugural Tables of Contents Regenerative Residency fellow. Her debut collection, "Some of Them Will Carry Me" (Dorothy, a publishing project), was named one of the New Yorker’s best books of 2022. She is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Winner of The Novel Prize, Giada's debut novel, "Ruins, Child", will be simultaneously published by New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (AU) in early 2026.

Reviews

[H.L.H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5: Big brain energy.

What a beautiful collection. You know how people say the quality of your writing is determined by the depth of your thinking? Scodellaro's depth of thinking is rivalled only by her depth of feeling.

Memory-- the sensory memory of an experience, the memory of thoughts darting, of where your eye moved in a room-- is layered upon itself, creating surreal snapshots that both evade and evoke time. Each story is a diorama. The experience of reading almost feels aimless, without the nagging "I should be doing something else" behind it. This timeless/aimless feeling is similar to that of committing to an afternoon with my Nonna, knowing I will be at the mercy of her whims for how our time will be spent: eating sliced fruit, moving her bedroom furniture, dusting the blinds, repairing a skirt together. I don't know how else to explain this reading experience.

I love the repeated motif of colourful suits in water, the strong images of the body close-up, the recipes, rich landscapes, disappearing people, travel, stasis, small daily rituals and their absurdities. The detail is breathtaking, and I was completely transported.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot of elegant and charming writing here. But I find it a bit too slippery, even for my tastes.

[Justine Kaufmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of Them Will Carry me is Giada Scodellaro’s debut and one of the two most recent Dorothy Project books to come out earlier this month. Made up of short stories and flash fiction, it is described as “a collage of social commentary, surrealism, recipes, folklore, and art” with Black women and their love and sensuality at the center. This isn’t a Leonora Carrington or Caren Beilin brand of surrealism, but a subtler kind that flows throughout the stories and emphasizes the characters’ states and unnerving, unstable surroundings. The language is quite spare, held back, but this gives the details their extra emphasis and power. The stories are not linked in an obvious sense, but you can feel a sort of connection across the stories, through these details that reoccur and leave a feeling of déjà vu. But even within a story and at a paragraph level, I remember moments where I would have to stop and reread a passage, to drink up the juxtaposition of elements that both create connections and underscore the quotidian. Moments like this one paragraph, two banal thoughts/ activities, connected by one paragraph and the imagery of moles and stamps, of lines on the body at the post office:

“Serendipità strips down to nothing. Three moles are visible: on her right breast, on her right inner thigh, on her top lip. Stretch marks on her right breast, on the right inner thigh, on her calves. Tomorrow she’ll purchase stamps from the post office. Tomorrow there’ll be lines of people gathered at the post office.”

As is the case with most flash fiction collections, some work better than others, but I think overall, this was an excellent debut collection that I think fits perfectly into Dorothy Project collection.


“The loss of language is dizzying. There are times when it’s lost. Words cannot be found and they will not come. It’s a blury loss, sorrowful. Like the word for grapefruit. Yesterday it was lost. Popillo? Popello? The word escapes me. To be bilingual is to be in a state of recovery.”


3.75-4*

[Rachel Hands · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up because I have learned to buy anything the Dorothy Project publishes, and it did not disappoint: what I can only describe as an unfairly good debut short story collection. I’ll be thinking about The Balcony in particular for a long time, and there were several moments where I thought “I might never write a sentence that good, and I’m at peace with that.”

[n · Rating 5 out of 5]

some of these were just unlike anything i’ve ever read before. loved “yyyy”, “the balcony”, and “hangnails, and other diseases”

[Maren Brander · Rating 2 out of 5]

i wanted to love this but it was so obscure? so i can’t even understand how to love it. this would be great for a literary group or class to deeply dissect, but not an easy read

[Beatriz · Rating 5 out of 5]

definitely a study of something

[Vanessa Stair · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is not a comparable author or book that comes to mind. This book is so black, queer and thought provoking and curious. It arranges beautiful, nostalgic, familiar and unfamiliar moments together. The short stories invoke all your senses, the imagery is as if you were reading paintings in an art exhibit, these collections of intricate details all seemingly different but weaved together through the common black experience. This book has touched me in all the right ways I find myself re reading it finding new references I missed the first time. Every now and again I think back to a story wishing I knew more.

[Colin · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was nice music in this here and there but generally it was a bit of a muddy reading experience. It has a lot to say, I think, but for me the arrangement and presentation kind of muffled whatever that might be.
It’s maybe an unfortunate symptom of like nu-school (as opposed to New School) MFA fiction that the reader ends up grappling with connectedness / interconnectedness / loose connectedness / brevity / how is this all working together rather than really settling into the book. “Pendergrass” is a great example of where the brevity and careful, detached composition shined thru. I think I agree with a friend’s review, which is that it could have been cut in half. Still, interested to see where this writer goes next

[Isabel · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautifully written fragments, but it is hard to piece together a common thread. really evocative sex writing.

[Emily Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The loss of a language is dizzying. There are times when it’s lost. Words cannot be found and they will not come. It’s a blurry loss, sorrowful. Like the word for grapefruit. Yesterday, it was lost. Popillo? Popello? The word escapes me. To be bilingual is to be in a state of recovery.”

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW. If you have taste go buy and read immediately.

[Edward Champion · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very impressive debut! Imagine if Lydia Davis had a little more magical realism in her work and you get a bit of the sense of what Scodellaro does. Although that's not entirely a fair comparison. What I dig about Scodellaro's writing is the way she takes femininity (particularly in relation to the body and the male gaze) and allows the rituals to flow into some truly surreal places. My favorite stories in this collection are "The Balcony" and "The New Husband" -- both of which are pitch-perfect examples of this. I do think Scodellaro doesn't need the footnotes. And some of the flash fiction is a bust, particularly the two recipe-related stories. But, on the whole, Scodellaro is definitely a writer I plan to read more of.

[Katie Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. authoritative& assured short stories that read like prose poetry. i loved being submerged in these worlds, which, while surreal, helped expand my understanding of my life/ body/ sexuality. and the writing on food, fantastic

[Kelly Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible collection. The cover art by Tschabalala Self is a perfect choice for this collage of fragmented yet intimate portraits with surprising breadth, held together by thin but grounding threads.

[Umar · Rating 5 out of 5]

only bangers from dorothy press. millennial mfa style prose at its absolute best: plain ass language, fucking wholesale elimination of interiority and what brandon taylor calls “trite physicality” usually annoys me but here it absolutely bangs because scodellaro has it turned up to 11 and is squeezing everything she can out of the style rather than just using it as set dressing. so good im gonna be coming back to this a lot

[Chantel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was interesting… It felt like I was reading an art exhibit. The thing about me and extremely ominous stories, is that I get frustrated because I think there is a deeper meaning that I am not grasping. This was the case for this book. There were some beautiful moments but in all I felt very unsatisfied :/

[Lene Kretschz · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars. With the exception of the stunning "The Balcony" (one of the longer stories in this brief collection), the second half of this little but surprisingly dense and meaty book is distinctly better than the first. While themes of identity, isolation, and the difficulties of establishing and maintaining intimacy are present throughout, the later stories seem to tackle this is in more interesting, often playful ways and there's more experimentation with form and the idea of what a story can be (can it be a tiny recipe? In Scodellaro's able hands, yes, it can!) But the book is so brief that really this hardly matters and the good stories outweigh the occasional somewhat tentative, meandering, or not quite fully formed examples. Pithy yet thought-provoking and resonant, this is a very worthwhile collection from an intriguing new voice I hope to hear more from very soon. Well done, Dorothy Project!

[Cardyn Brooks]

The cover art of "Two Women" by Tschabalala Self is a multi-media work as is Some of Them Will Carry Me. Poems, very short stories, footnotes and more offer a string of vignettes, mostly in English--"La Genovese" also in Italian--all contemplating and confessing to inhabiting womanhood while moving through a world that too often ignores, dismisses or distorts women's existence. In this collection women assert their voices and points of view and dynamic presence in a multitude of powerful ways that demand recognition.

http://blerdybingereader.blogspot.com...

[Joe Miguez · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd read Scodellaro's stories in Granta and The New Yorker, and was intrigued. Turns out those two stories were pretty much the best thing in this book. The rest of it, apart from the far-too-infrequent flashes of nice writing, felt like a bunch of long, meandering jokes without punchlines. Too much of this book felt weird for weirdness's sake, and I'm having a hard time remembering the last time a book under 200 pages felt like such a slog. All that being said, those flashes I described suggest there's a real talent there, and I hope in the future Scodellaro will apply it to more interesting work.

[cardulelia carduelis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Apparently I'm very much in the minority here but I did not like this. Every story is brimming with sexuality and visceral awareness of body. There is very little interior exploration - everything is on the surface, so much so that it feels like it's narrated by golums.
I've heard people love the writing but to me it was only serviceable.

A disappointment as I love short story collections, but this is less short stories and more a collection of flash fiction with the occasional short story.

Not for me, but clearly for many others, so probably I am the anomaly.

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the bizarre otherness of the worlds in these stories, where behaviors and social customs are odd and unpredictable (there are so many three-piece suits in the water, there is a child who seems to keep this woman in the corner of a room where she faces the wall, a woman sleeping on a construction site) but there are also poetic delicious seeming recipes interspersed. It's one of those books that I read and feel "I wish I wrote like this, this makes me want to write!"

[Nadina · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 Stars, because was some stories that l enjoyed, though such an abstract way of writing, lots of recipes?? Hmm and in a strange way, the yellow color is predominant in this book for l don’t know what reason or meaning.
Also some stories are so gross and disgusting, kinda: okay, this is fucked up…

What irritates me the most it’s the fake blurbs on the back of the book(s).

[Sarah]

I do not think I understood this collection of stories. The author has a strong voice and style that I admire, but I cannot honestly review without many “conditions.” Go with an open mind and see what you think.

[Ivy Rodgers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Abstract and surreal- at times it was hard to visualize what was happening within the stories. There were definitely some repeating threads throughout, which was interesting but wasn’t strong enough to really win me over.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giada Scodellaro has given us a collection of beautifully fragmented pieces about femininity and the body. Faves were The Balcony, YYYY, and Hangnails and Other Diseases. I also really loved the occasional recipes that were sprinkled throughout.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

good book

[Janine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short stories full of "quiet and melancholic intimacy." Giada Scodellaro's writing is simply, beautiful.

[Toshiro]

sand and citrus

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

themes of elbows and scallops and three pieces suits. a book i think i’ll keep coming back to.