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Company
A richly detailed, brilliantly woven debut collection about the lives and lore of one Black family
Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960’s to the 2000’s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, Company tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.
Each piece in Company includes a moment when a guest arrives at someone’s home. In “The Good, Good Men,” two brothers reunite to oust a “deadbeat” boyfriend from their mother’s house. In “The Everest Society,” the brothers’ sister anxiously prepares for a home visit from a social worker before adopting a child. In “Birds of Paradise,” their aunt, newly promoted to university provost, navigates a minefield of microaggressions at her own welcome party. And in the haunting title story, the provost’s sister finds her solitary life disrupted when her late sister’s daughter comes calling.
These are stories about intimacy, societial and familial obligations, and the ways inheritances shape our fates. Buoyant, somber, sharp, and affectionate, this collection announces a remarkable new voice in fiction.
Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960’s to the 2000’s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, Company tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.
Each piece in Company includes a moment when a guest arrives at someone’s home. In “The Good, Good Men,” two brothers reunite to oust a “deadbeat” boyfriend from their mother’s house. In “The Everest Society,” the brothers’ sister anxiously prepares for a home visit from a social worker before adopting a child. In “Birds of Paradise,” their aunt, newly promoted to university provost, navigates a minefield of microaggressions at her own welcome party. And in the haunting title story, the provost’s sister finds her solitary life disrupted when her late sister’s daughter comes calling.
These are stories about intimacy, societial and familial obligations, and the ways inheritances shape our fates. Buoyant, somber, sharp, and affectionate, this collection announces a remarkable new voice in fiction.
246 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 3, 2023
59 people are currently reading
9166 people want to read
About the author
Shannon Sanders
9 books38 followersShannon Sanders is a writer and attorney and the author of the short story collection Company. Sanders’s short fiction was the recipient of a 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and has appeared in several publications including One Story, TriQuarterly, Joyland, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband and three sons.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 128 reviews
June 14, 2024
i can't stop reading short story collections.
this one is nice and has some moments of being more than that, but it's overall disappointingly one note: these could run together, a series of quotidian moments and strangely abrupt endings. i enjoyed reading this at times, but it won't stick with me.
sorry.
bottom line: my favorite thing about short story collections is that you never know what's next. that wasn't true of this one.
this one is nice and has some moments of being more than that, but it's overall disappointingly one note: these could run together, a series of quotidian moments and strangely abrupt endings. i enjoyed reading this at times, but it won't stick with me.
sorry.
bottom line: my favorite thing about short story collections is that you never know what's next. that wasn't true of this one.
August 23, 2024
I laughed at certain moments and rolled my eyes at other points. A side of Black America that is often overlooked in media. So while I didn’t love the book, I loved that about the book.
November 20, 2024
This is a lively and intelligently written collection of short stories (mostly) about the Collins family capturing three generations, from the 1960's through the 2010's. Taken as a whole, the stories took shape as a novel would, although with missing gaps and not necessarily in chronological order. There is a family tree outlining the characters in the front of the book, which I referred to constantly as I read. In each story, a guest comes to visit - Hence, the collection's title is "Company."
The Collins are a middle-class black family, originally from Atlantic City. Opal and her husband Centennial own a jazz club there and raise four daughters, all college educated. One grows up to be a college provost, another an artist, one daughter never settled into a career and the youngest becomes a professional violinist. The stories revolve around themselves, their husbands and their children - all interesting, multi-faceted characters.
I read the book and think that it might be confusing as an audio book. I found myself totally absorbed and entertained. Now, I look forward to whatever the author decides to write next. This is her debut.
4.5 stars
Here is a book discussion with the author, Shannon Sanders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e20DH...
The Collins are a middle-class black family, originally from Atlantic City. Opal and her husband Centennial own a jazz club there and raise four daughters, all college educated. One grows up to be a college provost, another an artist, one daughter never settled into a career and the youngest becomes a professional violinist. The stories revolve around themselves, their husbands and their children - all interesting, multi-faceted characters.
I read the book and think that it might be confusing as an audio book. I found myself totally absorbed and entertained. Now, I look forward to whatever the author decides to write next. This is her debut.
4.5 stars
Here is a book discussion with the author, Shannon Sanders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e20DH...
October 3, 2023
3.5 stars
Company is such an apt title for this collection, because that is exactly what its stories give us: time in the company of its characters, varied and interesting as they all are. Something about these slice-of-life stories feels like being at a family function, and I mean that in the best way possible: catching up with people you haven't heard from in a while, getting the 411 on who did what to whom, what happened with whom, who was wrong or right about what. There are old and young characters, brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts and cousins. Families offer so much narrative material to explore, and Company is a real testament to that. That there is a family tree in the beginning of this collection tells you all that you need to know about it. It's a collection rooted in this family tree, its interest in the ways its various branches relate to each other, in major and minor ways, directly and peripherally.
We find the characters of Company, too, in very specific moments in time: at a party to celebrate a new position as dean of a college, in the kitchen preparing food for an early Christmas dinner, at a mother's house to celebrate her birthday. And it is precisely the specificity of these moments, these carefully calibrated scenes, that allows us to get to know these characters well: how they position themselves with respect to the characters around them (ingratiating? antagonistic? wary?), how they present (or intend to present) themselves, what their priorities are, what they notice and don't notice. This is all made possible by Sanders's confident and perceptive writing, its wryness lending the stories both their sharp insight and their wit and sense of humour. And in a collection that is so centered around its characters, Sanders is able to embody the idiom of each of her characters so effectively. Some stories take only one character's point of view, while others with more ensemble casts move fluidly between each character's voice--throughout all the stories, though, each character feels distinctly like themselves.
Altogether, a great collection that I really enjoyed. My favourite stories were: "La Belle Hotentote," "Amicus Curiae," and "Birds of Paradise."
Company is such an apt title for this collection, because that is exactly what its stories give us: time in the company of its characters, varied and interesting as they all are. Something about these slice-of-life stories feels like being at a family function, and I mean that in the best way possible: catching up with people you haven't heard from in a while, getting the 411 on who did what to whom, what happened with whom, who was wrong or right about what. There are old and young characters, brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts and cousins. Families offer so much narrative material to explore, and Company is a real testament to that. That there is a family tree in the beginning of this collection tells you all that you need to know about it. It's a collection rooted in this family tree, its interest in the ways its various branches relate to each other, in major and minor ways, directly and peripherally.
We find the characters of Company, too, in very specific moments in time: at a party to celebrate a new position as dean of a college, in the kitchen preparing food for an early Christmas dinner, at a mother's house to celebrate her birthday. And it is precisely the specificity of these moments, these carefully calibrated scenes, that allows us to get to know these characters well: how they position themselves with respect to the characters around them (ingratiating? antagonistic? wary?), how they present (or intend to present) themselves, what their priorities are, what they notice and don't notice. This is all made possible by Sanders's confident and perceptive writing, its wryness lending the stories both their sharp insight and their wit and sense of humour. And in a collection that is so centered around its characters, Sanders is able to embody the idiom of each of her characters so effectively. Some stories take only one character's point of view, while others with more ensemble casts move fluidly between each character's voice--throughout all the stories, though, each character feels distinctly like themselves.
Altogether, a great collection that I really enjoyed. My favourite stories were: "La Belle Hotentote," "Amicus Curiae," and "Birds of Paradise."
May 19, 2024
A typical, literary series of stories with connections or shared characters from one story to the other. (Sometimes.) Here we have several members of one large family: grandparents, parents, mothers, sisters, in-laws and hangers-on. Problem is, even with the small family tree at the start of the book, it's difficult to tell who is who, who's married to whom, and so on. (Many of the characters are NOT on the tree.) The family gets together at a celebratory party in one story; at the home of a recently-deceased member in another. There's another story where the characters don't do very much but talk and complain. I often had to read back to a previous story to figure out who all these people were. (Sometimes it helped, not always.) And the problem with that is this: too much time and energy spent by the reader simply trying to figure everything out. The story, the message, the sentiment, the reason we're reading gets LOST.
I actually enjoy short story collections, whether they are literary or in a genre like horror or sci-fi. (I own several.) But these just rang flat, like a bell with a broken clapper. However, I did read on because of the great things I'd heard about the book. But there's no light at the end of the tunnel here...
Just boredom.
Two stars.
I actually enjoy short story collections, whether they are literary or in a genre like horror or sci-fi. (I own several.) But these just rang flat, like a bell with a broken clapper. However, I did read on because of the great things I'd heard about the book. But there's no light at the end of the tunnel here...
Just boredom.
Two stars.
June 12, 2024
Sanders’s energetic debut novel-in-stories traces several generations of the Collins clan, whose experiences at once exemplify African American gentrification and evoke timeless patterns of parental legacy and sibling jealousy. Sisters Cassandra, Fay, Lee and Suzette grew up at their parents’ Atlantic City jazz club before going their separate ways: Cassandra to a PhD and provost position at a college, Fay to painting and the role of family spirit-keeper, Lee to her own brood of four and a no-good jazz musician husband, and Suzette to music and a too-early death. With roots in Mississippi, they have dispersed to Atlanta, New York City and Washington, DC.
We revisit relatives at different points in their lives, mostly between the 1990s and the present day. There are 13 linked stories here, 10 in the third person and three with a first-person narrator. Each focuses on a different individual or set of characters. Celebration scenes make for memorable moments. “Bird of Paradise” is set at the party to commemorate Cassandra’s new position. There’s a Black president at the time and people can’t stop comparing her dress to Michelle Obama’s inaugural ball attire, while she can’t stop fretting that she and her nieces will live up to stereotypes of Black women’s bodies. Later, “La Belle Hottentote” revisits this evening from the nieces’ perspective as they ponder where the family’s money came from. In “Rioja,” Cassandra’s daughter Cecilia, visiting her boyfriend Cole’s family for Thanksgiving, tries not to embarrass him with any pretentious or avant-garde behavior.
The title story, which is among the stand-outs, is the only one to feature the grandparent generation – though Opal and Centennial are but ghosts commenting on the begrudging welcome Fay offers when her niece Aubrey turns up on her doorstep in New Jersey. Fay is the sole sister without partner or children, but she got the family home as a sort of consolation prize and fills its walls with symbolism-heavy portraits of four sisters. My other favorite, alongside this and “Bird of Paradise,” was “The Opal Cleft,” in which Lee’s son Theo hosts his cousin Cyrus (Cassandra’s son) while the latter performs his drag queen act in the area.
I was reminded by turns of Danielle Evans, Kim Coleman Foote and Deesha Philyaw, while final story “The Everest Society,” about Lee’s daughter Mariolive’s desperation to impress the social worker who has to okay her and Dante adopting, recalls Sidik Fofana with its composite picture of their apartment building’s residents. In a few cases I felt that Sanders might have extended the sphere too wide by moving outside the family: “The Gatekeepers” I assume is about a co-worker or neighbor of Cassandra’s; “Mote” is about Cole’s cousin and his partner (and makes the one white woman in the book evil…); and “Dragonflies” features that cousin’s colleague. It’s not to say that these aren’t good stories, but I wondered why they couldn’t have starred extended family members instead.
Trying to get pregnant and the early days of motherhood are recurring concerns, as is the distribution of talent and wealth around the family and beyond. As these characters reach toward the upper middle class, they keep in mind the struggles they came from. Although the family legends morph over the years, shared habits and heirlooms make connections across the generations. Sanders is strong on characterization, scene-setting and social observation; I would happily have spent even longer with the Collins family. I’ll be keen to follow her career in the years to come.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
We revisit relatives at different points in their lives, mostly between the 1990s and the present day. There are 13 linked stories here, 10 in the third person and three with a first-person narrator. Each focuses on a different individual or set of characters. Celebration scenes make for memorable moments. “Bird of Paradise” is set at the party to commemorate Cassandra’s new position. There’s a Black president at the time and people can’t stop comparing her dress to Michelle Obama’s inaugural ball attire, while she can’t stop fretting that she and her nieces will live up to stereotypes of Black women’s bodies. Later, “La Belle Hottentote” revisits this evening from the nieces’ perspective as they ponder where the family’s money came from. In “Rioja,” Cassandra’s daughter Cecilia, visiting her boyfriend Cole’s family for Thanksgiving, tries not to embarrass him with any pretentious or avant-garde behavior.
The title story, which is among the stand-outs, is the only one to feature the grandparent generation – though Opal and Centennial are but ghosts commenting on the begrudging welcome Fay offers when her niece Aubrey turns up on her doorstep in New Jersey. Fay is the sole sister without partner or children, but she got the family home as a sort of consolation prize and fills its walls with symbolism-heavy portraits of four sisters. My other favorite, alongside this and “Bird of Paradise,” was “The Opal Cleft,” in which Lee’s son Theo hosts his cousin Cyrus (Cassandra’s son) while the latter performs his drag queen act in the area.
I was reminded by turns of Danielle Evans, Kim Coleman Foote and Deesha Philyaw, while final story “The Everest Society,” about Lee’s daughter Mariolive’s desperation to impress the social worker who has to okay her and Dante adopting, recalls Sidik Fofana with its composite picture of their apartment building’s residents. In a few cases I felt that Sanders might have extended the sphere too wide by moving outside the family: “The Gatekeepers” I assume is about a co-worker or neighbor of Cassandra’s; “Mote” is about Cole’s cousin and his partner (and makes the one white woman in the book evil…); and “Dragonflies” features that cousin’s colleague. It’s not to say that these aren’t good stories, but I wondered why they couldn’t have starred extended family members instead.
Trying to get pregnant and the early days of motherhood are recurring concerns, as is the distribution of talent and wealth around the family and beyond. As these characters reach toward the upper middle class, they keep in mind the struggles they came from. Although the family legends morph over the years, shared habits and heirlooms make connections across the generations. Sanders is strong on characterization, scene-setting and social observation; I would happily have spent even longer with the Collins family. I’ll be keen to follow her career in the years to come.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
April 9, 2024
review to come.
March 18, 2024
After listening to the story Dragonflies from this short story collection through the LeVar Burton Reads podcast, I wanted to read the entire collection. I'm so glad I did, for the rest of the stories were excellent. Most but not all centered around the Black multigenerational Collins family, and their four daughters and offspring, covering several decades.
Some of my favorite stories-
Bird of Paradise: Cassandra, the oldest of the Collins sisters is an academic who has been promoted to provost at her university, and relies on her nieces to support her at her congratulations party when her husband and two children bow out. But some petty jealousies erupt among the women, and the location of one of her nieces at the end is quite scandalous.
La Belle Hottentote: A later story from the perspective of Cassandra's nieces, shares the party story again. You will never look at the front cover of this book the same way again after reading these two stories.
Dragonflies: After the family's matriarch dies, the family is left to sort through her belongings and settle her estate. As they box up their grandma's beloved dragonfly collection, the family bickers about the details and some jealousies arise over who gets what, but also great affection between family members is shown. This was the story on the LBR podcast that made me pick up the novel.
Company: We finally meet the last of the four sisters, Felice who has one of her nieces drop in unexpectedly. We finally learn how the father died, and understand why that trauma affected the sister's relationships in the years to come. It made me think of my mother and her sisters and the jealousies I saw arise between them.
Thanks to LeVar Burton for introducing me to this author and her short stories!
Some of my favorite stories-
Bird of Paradise: Cassandra, the oldest of the Collins sisters is an academic who has been promoted to provost at her university, and relies on her nieces to support her at her congratulations party when her husband and two children bow out. But some petty jealousies erupt among the women, and the location of one of her nieces at the end is quite scandalous.
La Belle Hottentote: A later story from the perspective of Cassandra's nieces, shares the party story again. You will never look at the front cover of this book the same way again after reading these two stories.
Dragonflies: After the family's matriarch dies, the family is left to sort through her belongings and settle her estate. As they box up their grandma's beloved dragonfly collection, the family bickers about the details and some jealousies arise over who gets what, but also great affection between family members is shown. This was the story on the LBR podcast that made me pick up the novel.
Company: We finally meet the last of the four sisters, Felice who has one of her nieces drop in unexpectedly. We finally learn how the father died, and understand why that trauma affected the sister's relationships in the years to come. It made me think of my mother and her sisters and the jealousies I saw arise between them.
Thanks to LeVar Burton for introducing me to this author and her short stories!
August 7, 2023
Had the best reaction to this book—I wanted to speed through it because I was loving it, but also wanted to slow down because I didn’t want it to end. With themes of inheritance, welcoming, grief, manners, the unreliability of memory, and more, these stories are entertaining, punchy, and moving. You’ll be delighted when moments and characters return in different forms in later stories. I’ll be recommending this one for a long time.
February 5, 2024
Full review here: https://dearstrangethings.substack.co...
September 15, 2024
Delightful!
“Crying about a man who doesn’t want you is worse than walking around with your buttons in the wrong holes.”
“Crying about a man who doesn’t want you is worse than walking around with your buttons in the wrong holes.”
March 3, 2024
At its simplest, Company is a collection of (loosely) interconnected short stories, that cleverly and creatively weave together a vividly rich, and sharply observed familal tapestry. Exploring themes of; memory, religion, gender, sexuality, age, race -and much much more
However, at its finest, each of the thirteen tales (individually and collectively) manage to deftly delve much deeper than mere surface level stuff, when it comes to the aforementioned themes above.
Through Sanders fragmentary style narrative, we (the reader) are not only privy to a plethora of alternate perspectives (most notably witnessed through the intergenerational divide in "Bird of Paradise" and "La Belle Hottentote"), but can also foresee how certain situations and subsequent behaviours, appear to be a recurrence within the families tapestry (whether that’d due to nature or nurture -you decide).
The only reason I’m holding off on a solid four stars (I think I’d at least give the high end of 3.5) is unfortunately I found the closing chapter rather an abrupt and unsatisfying ending, to an otherwise consistently engaging collective.
That said, I still very much look forward to reading what Sanders writes next!
3.5 stars
PS ~ thank you to the publishers for sending me a copy :)
However, at its finest, each of the thirteen tales (individually and collectively) manage to deftly delve much deeper than mere surface level stuff, when it comes to the aforementioned themes above.
Through Sanders fragmentary style narrative, we (the reader) are not only privy to a plethora of alternate perspectives (most notably witnessed through the intergenerational divide in "Bird of Paradise" and "La Belle Hottentote"), but can also foresee how certain situations and subsequent behaviours, appear to be a recurrence within the families tapestry (whether that’d due to nature or nurture -you decide).
The only reason I’m holding off on a solid four stars (I think I’d at least give the high end of 3.5) is unfortunately I found the closing chapter rather an abrupt and unsatisfying ending, to an otherwise consistently engaging collective.
That said, I still very much look forward to reading what Sanders writes next!
3.5 stars
PS ~ thank you to the publishers for sending me a copy :)
December 12, 2023
My favorite book of 2023. These interconnected stories about an extended family focus on relationships rather than trauma. The way various characters popped up in different chapters felt like finding Easter eggs.
July 18, 2024
I think the synopsis on the book itself is quite misleading as it indicates that the story follows different generations of one family but there were times when whole chapters were about people outside of that family who you didn’t know. It was definitely more a collection of short stories focusing on motherhood, marriage and families from varying perspectives. It wasn’t my favourite and I wouldn’t say I was hooked the entire time. I found some chapters more engaging than others, and the fact that some of it was about the family and some wasn’t meant that I was constantly checking the family tree at the beginning, even between paragraphs, so the stories themselves felt disjointed at times. I also felt that I never really knew the characters and therefore cared about them as you’d spend a chapter with them and them move on, I don’t think they were given the depth or time that they should’ve been.
August 22, 2025
The Good, Good Men: ⭐⭐.5
Bird of Paradise: ⭐⭐⭐
The Gatekeepers: ⭐
Rule Number One: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rioja: ⭐⭐⭐
La Belle Hottentote: ⭐⭐
Mote: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Dragonflies: ⭐
Amicus Curiae: ⭐⭐
The Opal Cleft: ⭐
Three Guests: DNF
Company: DNF
The Everest Society: ⭐⭐
Average: 2.03 ⭐
Bird of Paradise: ⭐⭐⭐
The Gatekeepers: ⭐
Rule Number One: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rioja: ⭐⭐⭐
La Belle Hottentote: ⭐⭐
Mote: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Dragonflies: ⭐
Amicus Curiae: ⭐⭐
The Opal Cleft: ⭐
Three Guests: DNF
Company: DNF
The Everest Society: ⭐⭐
Average: 2.03 ⭐
July 2, 2024
too many people doing too many things.
July 30, 2024
Who wouldn’t just love a book that starts off with a family tree?
This book collection of interconnected stories, mainly about the Collins family – four sisters, their mother, and their children – is just lovely, simple, and profound. They are absolutely worth a repeat listen. The commonplace events – ranging from celebrations and deaths to bad partner picks and sisterly disagreements – are magical, thanks to the preciseness of the language, the underlying humor and pathos.
I just listened to and loved it. This is a Thanksgiving story from the audiobook "Company" where a new family is introduced to a Collins woman close to a man who rudely rejects her acceptance. This story was filled with heart, surprise, drama – reminiscent of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw’s award-winning work.
It’s the emotional complexity and the twist endings that lend themselves to the charm of these stories. This collection is my Top Ten for 2024, given my love for audiobooks. If you’re looking for a great audiobook: humor, heart, and a dash of the commonplace made magical, you have to listen to these stories. You will be eagerly awaiting the next story in the lives of the Collins family.
This book collection of interconnected stories, mainly about the Collins family – four sisters, their mother, and their children – is just lovely, simple, and profound. They are absolutely worth a repeat listen. The commonplace events – ranging from celebrations and deaths to bad partner picks and sisterly disagreements – are magical, thanks to the preciseness of the language, the underlying humor and pathos.
I just listened to and loved it. This is a Thanksgiving story from the audiobook "Company" where a new family is introduced to a Collins woman close to a man who rudely rejects her acceptance. This story was filled with heart, surprise, drama – reminiscent of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw’s award-winning work.
It’s the emotional complexity and the twist endings that lend themselves to the charm of these stories. This collection is my Top Ten for 2024, given my love for audiobooks. If you’re looking for a great audiobook: humor, heart, and a dash of the commonplace made magical, you have to listen to these stories. You will be eagerly awaiting the next story in the lives of the Collins family.
October 11, 2023
Company is a collection of stories connected by the members of one middle-class Black family in America. It's about microaggressions and control issues, generational conflict, family relationships, and the culture of this particular family: how things are done, how hierarchies work, who capes for whom and why. Many of the stories end with humiliation or unhappiness; others simply capture moments of a life. Characters are well-drawn and filled out and Sanders has an excellent ear for dialogue and creating tension within it. It's a great book for book clubs and in-depth discussion.
November 29, 2024
4.5. I really really liked it. Close to 5 stars but some stories finished a bit weaker than others. But a couple of these were really perfect short stories with proper landing impact. Feeling like a short story convert these days.
July 23, 2025
While not always consistently brilliant across stories, there is a spark of an amazing writer of prose. I look forward to more by Sanders.
June 20, 2024
I don’t usually find myself unable to put down a collection of short stories. Bravo.
July 16, 2024
This fiction book follow the trend of short stories with interrelated characters who keep appearing in the different stories. If you like that pattern (and I do) you might like this well-written character-driven collection. It surrounds the Collins family, with patriarchs who kept the family afloat by toiling away at their nightclub. Subsequent stories follow the later generations and their various conflicts. I enjoyed it. It was an easy, yet quality read.
January 18, 2024
Reading the blurb and copy, I feel like the way this book is advertised is what whoever wrote that wanted it to be more than what it is. It feels pretty unfocussed; not quite a novel, not quite a collection of short stories, you end up jumping back and forth through time and from person to person - some repeated, most not, most related to a single family but some seemingly completely disconnected (or at least, difficult enough for me to figure how they could be related that I gave up) - in a series of slice-of-life vignettes that would probably work well as single pieces in literary magazines but as a book feel largely pointless. The few that I did find genuinely engaging raised questions that never got answered, or hinted at stories that weren't told, which works nicely on their own but becomes genuinely frustrating for a whole book. Most of the characters seemed to be variations on a theme which frankly was never going to engage me - straight people who care about respectability and children - and I ended up almost dreading picking the book up for the next chapter.
Having said that, while this isn't for me it's not bad. It's clearly competently written for what it is (this kind of debut has MFA running right through it but that does mean it's polished) and I think it will appeal to the right readers. A couple of the stories did hold my interest enough that I would've liked them to continue or be fleshed out more, and there was one I really liked. The idea of the family threads was good and while the potential of it wasn't quite realised I feel at least part of the issue with this book is down to editing rather than writing, as I feel with solid guidance and maybe a few rewritten chapters this book could be much more cohesive, if nothing else. It also hit a lot of my personal pet peeves: constant jumping around between characters that felt more like a desperate scrabble for enough to fill a book than a purposive style device; characters meant to be relatable to the modern reader that ended up feeling bland if you aren't a specific type of 20 to 30-something young professional who idealises the marriage-and-children pipeline; over reliance on the reader trying to piece together timelines like Easter eggs in the hopes they'll miss the lack of substance; but for readers without these issues there's far worse books out there.
Having said that, while this isn't for me it's not bad. It's clearly competently written for what it is (this kind of debut has MFA running right through it but that does mean it's polished) and I think it will appeal to the right readers. A couple of the stories did hold my interest enough that I would've liked them to continue or be fleshed out more, and there was one I really liked. The idea of the family threads was good and while the potential of it wasn't quite realised I feel at least part of the issue with this book is down to editing rather than writing, as I feel with solid guidance and maybe a few rewritten chapters this book could be much more cohesive, if nothing else. It also hit a lot of my personal pet peeves: constant jumping around between characters that felt more like a desperate scrabble for enough to fill a book than a purposive style device; characters meant to be relatable to the modern reader that ended up feeling bland if you aren't a specific type of 20 to 30-something young professional who idealises the marriage-and-children pipeline; over reliance on the reader trying to piece together timelines like Easter eggs in the hopes they'll miss the lack of substance; but for readers without these issues there's far worse books out there.
November 15, 2023
I like the voice this book was written in. The stories in each chapter were well developed and interesting. Unfortunately, I realize they were about a family, But it didn't seem very cohesive. You would forget who they were talking about and what relationship they had with previous characters. So there was nothing that really tied them together as a book it was more like a single chapter about a person. Then, several chapters later, you come across another chapter involving that same character at a different point in their life. But then you would have a hard time figure out where you had read about them before and their relationship to the whole.
January 3, 2025
Exceptional book of connected shorts. Clean and clear authentic voice of a new author.
Book Club Selection
Book Club Selection
April 13, 2025
Short stories that largely revolve around one African American family—and the company they keep.
Well, that’s a trite way to put it, I suppose. But the book title (which is also a short story title) is apt. Many stories in this collection revolve around social niceties, and traditions often passed down from mother to daughter.
The Collins family matriarch and patriarch own a jazz club in New York, but much of the action with their descendants takes place in Washington, DC. So, already some bias for me. :P Sanders’s writing is sharp and insightful, though sometimes I had more trouble connecting than I’d hoped. We are so deep in with characters that it can be difficult to maintain an understanding of place and plot. But I’m not entirely certain that this isn’t more of a Me Problem than usual, that I’ve let outside influences distract me from good short storytelling in the vein of Alice Munro, Marilyn Robinson, Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston.
Those particular comparisons come from Kristen Vega in her Adroit Journal review. “The mood of this collection is like your auntie’s parlor table piled with family photos: gossip shrouds the photographs, high school footballers symbolize car crashes, family reunions emanate family feuds, and newlyweds signify bad ex-husbands,” Vega continues. “The book’s cover illustrator, Kimberly Glyder, understood this when she drew a double decker row house, reminiscent of the Collins’s family home, in a thick gold frame. Even holding the book in my hand, Company feels like a family portrait. “
The titular story involves one character profiting off of paintings of the family. Said character, Fay, lives alone when her niece springs upon her suddenly, looking for clues about the life of her deceased mother. Fay, harboring resentments, isn’t fully forthcoming. She finds her “company smile” to allow the girl in, but she can’t keep up the charade forever, despite some guilt from the ghosts of her forebears. A character who can’t, or refuses to connect to the living, finds herself all alone.
Two stories that stuck out to me the most were “Bird of Paradise” and “La Bella Hottentote.” They cover the same event—a social gathering in honor of Fay’s sister Cassandra becoming provost at a DC university. Cassandra, in attempting to navigate the social politics at a largely white engagement, can’t get her immediate family to join her, and relies on her nieces instead. We get a handle of who her nieces are as people, and even they can’t keep it together enough for a professionally helpful family photo. Several nieces bulk against Cassandra’s affectations, and they debate whether their grandmother the jazz club owner had to do the same.
Opal, in fact, showed her true colors, eschewing any sort of decorum, as an old woman in “Amicus Curae.” She takes one look at the son-in-law who betrayed her daughter and declared, “Get him off my property!...Get him away from my girl!”
“Try to make people feel good about being around you,” Opal’s daughter, Suzette, mother to the niece in “Company,” says herself in “Rule Number One.” “Happy. Comfortable. Unafraid. It’ll make your life easier. Always look out for your sister. Always, always look out for your sister. She won’t always want you to, but do it anyway, even then. Especially then.”
Looking out for people isn’t always easy in these stories, like in the first one, “”The Good, Good Men” where Opal’s daughter Lela’s sons attempt, in their way, to save her from, er, unworthy men. :P Maybe Lela’s daughter, Mariolove, is the one to break the cycle in the last story, “The Everest Society.” She and her husband are looking to adopt, and she is stressed out about the state of her apartment, where an out of service elevator leads to less than sightly conditions. But looked at in another light, she can see how the community is coming together. Certainly some great company for any new child.
Well, that’s a trite way to put it, I suppose. But the book title (which is also a short story title) is apt. Many stories in this collection revolve around social niceties, and traditions often passed down from mother to daughter.
The Collins family matriarch and patriarch own a jazz club in New York, but much of the action with their descendants takes place in Washington, DC. So, already some bias for me. :P Sanders’s writing is sharp and insightful, though sometimes I had more trouble connecting than I’d hoped. We are so deep in with characters that it can be difficult to maintain an understanding of place and plot. But I’m not entirely certain that this isn’t more of a Me Problem than usual, that I’ve let outside influences distract me from good short storytelling in the vein of Alice Munro, Marilyn Robinson, Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston.
Those particular comparisons come from Kristen Vega in her Adroit Journal review. “The mood of this collection is like your auntie’s parlor table piled with family photos: gossip shrouds the photographs, high school footballers symbolize car crashes, family reunions emanate family feuds, and newlyweds signify bad ex-husbands,” Vega continues. “The book’s cover illustrator, Kimberly Glyder, understood this when she drew a double decker row house, reminiscent of the Collins’s family home, in a thick gold frame. Even holding the book in my hand, Company feels like a family portrait. “
The titular story involves one character profiting off of paintings of the family. Said character, Fay, lives alone when her niece springs upon her suddenly, looking for clues about the life of her deceased mother. Fay, harboring resentments, isn’t fully forthcoming. She finds her “company smile” to allow the girl in, but she can’t keep up the charade forever, despite some guilt from the ghosts of her forebears. A character who can’t, or refuses to connect to the living, finds herself all alone.
Two stories that stuck out to me the most were “Bird of Paradise” and “La Bella Hottentote.” They cover the same event—a social gathering in honor of Fay’s sister Cassandra becoming provost at a DC university. Cassandra, in attempting to navigate the social politics at a largely white engagement, can’t get her immediate family to join her, and relies on her nieces instead. We get a handle of who her nieces are as people, and even they can’t keep it together enough for a professionally helpful family photo. Several nieces bulk against Cassandra’s affectations, and they debate whether their grandmother the jazz club owner had to do the same.
Opal, in fact, showed her true colors, eschewing any sort of decorum, as an old woman in “Amicus Curae.” She takes one look at the son-in-law who betrayed her daughter and declared, “Get him off my property!...Get him away from my girl!”
“Try to make people feel good about being around you,” Opal’s daughter, Suzette, mother to the niece in “Company,” says herself in “Rule Number One.” “Happy. Comfortable. Unafraid. It’ll make your life easier. Always look out for your sister. Always, always look out for your sister. She won’t always want you to, but do it anyway, even then. Especially then.”
Looking out for people isn’t always easy in these stories, like in the first one, “”The Good, Good Men” where Opal’s daughter Lela’s sons attempt, in their way, to save her from, er, unworthy men. :P Maybe Lela’s daughter, Mariolove, is the one to break the cycle in the last story, “The Everest Society.” She and her husband are looking to adopt, and she is stressed out about the state of her apartment, where an out of service elevator leads to less than sightly conditions. But looked at in another light, she can see how the community is coming together. Certainly some great company for any new child.
April 28, 2024
Company is a difficult book to review, because it is hard to describe what it is about. Ostensibly a collection of interlinked short stories, which provide us with 13 snapshots of one Black American family, I preferred to take each story on its own terms. Reading the stories in a relatively short space of time, I enjoyed the way they began to accumulate, and I started to get a fuller sense of various characters and their relationships. I especially loved the way we got to see the same characters from different perspectives, and Shannon Sanders does an incredible job of humanising everyone while showing everyone to be flawed. But I think each story also works on its own, and that they interact with each other rather than fitting together to give a complete picture. I also have to admit that for 3 of the stories, the family connection was lost on me, and I just saw them as separate stories.
I might have given Company five stars, instead of four, if the overall structure of the stories was clearer to me. For example, the last story doesn't reveal its family connection until the very end, while the family connection of 'Rioja' doesn't become clear until the start of the next story, but then 'La Belle Hottentote' retells the story of 'Bird of Paradise' from a different perspective. But this was a solid four (it would be four and a half if that were possible) star read for me. I really enjoyed each story on its own merit, and many of them worked together to increase my enjoyment, as I have already noted. I was endlessly impressed by how much depth Shannon Sanders gives to her characters and their relationships in such a short space of time, as well as how real the characters and families feel. I love a family saga, and this is one of my new favourites. Definitely an author to watch.
Company is out on 2 May. Thank you to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for an advance copy.
I might have given Company five stars, instead of four, if the overall structure of the stories was clearer to me. For example, the last story doesn't reveal its family connection until the very end, while the family connection of 'Rioja' doesn't become clear until the start of the next story, but then 'La Belle Hottentote' retells the story of 'Bird of Paradise' from a different perspective. But this was a solid four (it would be four and a half if that were possible) star read for me. I really enjoyed each story on its own merit, and many of them worked together to increase my enjoyment, as I have already noted. I was endlessly impressed by how much depth Shannon Sanders gives to her characters and their relationships in such a short space of time, as well as how real the characters and families feel. I love a family saga, and this is one of my new favourites. Definitely an author to watch.
Company is out on 2 May. Thank you to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for an advance copy.
March 21, 2024
Review by Julia Romero, Book Reviewer at October Hill Magazine
PEN award-winning Shannon Sanders debuts with Company, a short story collection that follows a Black extended family navigating through the muddy waters of expectation, prejudice, secrets, and success. Throughout the thirteen stories, Sanders slowly peels back the layers of history, artfully placing the puzzle pieces to slowly reveal the painful peculiarities of a family. What struck me while reading is how often I recognized myself and my extended family in the flawed characters Sanders brought to life. She has succeeded, quite effortlessly, in emulating what familial relationships often feel like—obligatory, yet comforting; hostile, yet loving. She does this through her cutting dialogue and the subtle repercussions that reverberate through generations.
Within the first few pages, the reader is faced with a family tree, seemingly transcribed directly onto the page by a scribbling hand. (Later on, it’s revealed that one of the characters has indeed created the family tree.) A brilliant choice by Sanders. The reader understands immediately that the stories will be interconnected, or at the very least, kaleidoscopic. Some of my favorites of the collection include the opener “The Good, Good Men,” the short but poignant “Rule Number One,” and the bittersweet “Three Guests,” one of the longer stories that closes off the collection...Read the rest of the review in October Hill Magazine's Fall 2023 Issue
PEN award-winning Shannon Sanders debuts with Company, a short story collection that follows a Black extended family navigating through the muddy waters of expectation, prejudice, secrets, and success. Throughout the thirteen stories, Sanders slowly peels back the layers of history, artfully placing the puzzle pieces to slowly reveal the painful peculiarities of a family. What struck me while reading is how often I recognized myself and my extended family in the flawed characters Sanders brought to life. She has succeeded, quite effortlessly, in emulating what familial relationships often feel like—obligatory, yet comforting; hostile, yet loving. She does this through her cutting dialogue and the subtle repercussions that reverberate through generations.
Within the first few pages, the reader is faced with a family tree, seemingly transcribed directly onto the page by a scribbling hand. (Later on, it’s revealed that one of the characters has indeed created the family tree.) A brilliant choice by Sanders. The reader understands immediately that the stories will be interconnected, or at the very least, kaleidoscopic. Some of my favorites of the collection include the opener “The Good, Good Men,” the short but poignant “Rule Number One,” and the bittersweet “Three Guests,” one of the longer stories that closes off the collection...Read the rest of the review in October Hill Magazine's Fall 2023 Issue
February 5, 2024
This debut collection of interconnected short stories was a delightful read spent time "in company" with various members of the Collins family, a Black middle class family. Most of the stories revolve around visits or gatherings of some kind--holidays, funerals, work events. The characters are all well-drawn, especially their interactions with each other, steeped in patterns and shared history and inside jokes. Many center around the theme of inheritance, both in terms of stories, traits, and, in one of my favorite stories "Dragonflies", actual objects passed down. The interconnected aspect of the stories lets you see some characters from different vantage points depending on whose perspective carries the story--most effectively in a pairing of two other favorite stories "Bird of Paradise" and "La Belle Hottentote". Both take place at the same outdoor party celebrating an aunt's promotion to dean at her college, but one story centers the aunt's story as a professional having to endure a lot to rise in her profession, and the other story from the perspective of her four nieces in attendance, from another generation, who have different expectations and views for themselves. Other favorite stories were "The Gatekeepers", "Rioja", "Mote"-this one had a great unexpected ending-, and "The Everest Society."
January 9, 2024
A phenomenal debut collection, I will be looking for more from Shannon Sanders. I was fortunate to attend an intimate gathering with the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library, where a representative from Graywolf Press shared their recent releases. The rep mentioned how though this is a collection of short stories, the same characters pop in and out, and indeed that is one of the most interesting aspects of this collection... as you realize, oh wait, this is one of the nieces! This is the sister! And so on.
Sanders is a brilliant writer, and there is so much nuance in each story with the dynamics between people, baggage old and new, and it seems always, always, the pressure on Black people to be above reproach, immaculate, taking every microaggression in stride without letting even a bead of sweat show. Keep a spotless powder room at all times for company, expected or not. Reheel shoes before they need it. How incredible it is that Black people achieve everything they do despite the constant barrage of impediments.
Karen Chilton does a marvelous job of performing the audiobook. Highly recommended.
Sanders is a brilliant writer, and there is so much nuance in each story with the dynamics between people, baggage old and new, and it seems always, always, the pressure on Black people to be above reproach, immaculate, taking every microaggression in stride without letting even a bead of sweat show. Keep a spotless powder room at all times for company, expected or not. Reheel shoes before they need it. How incredible it is that Black people achieve everything they do despite the constant barrage of impediments.
Karen Chilton does a marvelous job of performing the audiobook. Highly recommended.
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