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In the Not Quite Dark: Stories
In the Not Quite Dark: Stories | Dana Johnson
11 posts | 2 read | 3 to read
Following her prize-winning collection "Break Any Woman Down," Dana Johnson returns with a collection of bold stories set mostly in downtown Los Angeles that examine large issues love, class, race and how they influence and define our most intimate moments. In The Liberace Museum, a mixed-race couple leave the South toward the destination of Vegas, crossing miles of road and history to the promised land of consumption; in Rogues, a young man on break from college lands in his brother s Inland Empire neighborhood during a rash of unexplained robberies; in She Deserves Everything She Gets, a woman listens to the strict advice given to her spoiled niece about going away to college, reflecting on her own experience and the night she lost her best friend; and in the collection s title story, a man setting down roots in downtown L.A. is haunted by the specter of both gentrification and a young female tourist, whose body was found in the water tower of a neighboring building. With deep insight into character, intimate relationships, and the modern search for personal freedom, "In the Not Quite Dark" is powerful new work that feels both urgent and timeless."
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Bertha_Mason

"She was a good poet herself, but I didn‘t give her credit for it at the time because I didn‘t think that bland, correct-looking people could be poets. That‘s my fault, getting caught up in the costumes. No blaming it on the Harvard boys."
-"No Blaming the Harvard Boys"

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Bertha_Mason

The protagonist of "No Blaming the Harvard Boys," who's trying to get laid at the party she's at, reminds me painfully of myself trying to get laid at parties in college. It burns. ?

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Bertha_Mason
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-"No Blaming the Harvard Boys"

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Bertha_Mason

"I watched the Colonel walk away, the ass of his seersucker pants sagging. His suit did not fit him as well as he thought it did." ⚰
-"No Blaming the Harvard Boys"

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Bertha_Mason

"He‘d tried to dress like the future he would be delivered into, the life of a professor who looked like an actor playing a professor, tried to look like Joyce or Lawrence but instead looked like a poor man‘s Faulkner or a young, dark-haired Colonel Sanders." ??
-"No Blaming the Harvard Boys"

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Bertha_Mason

"Even before the dead girl in the water tower, Dean has been haunted."
-"Now, In the Not Quite Dark"

Hell of an opening line.

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Bertha_Mason

I had to skip a transmisogynistic story ("Sunshine").

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Bertha_Mason
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I also bought these two because I needed to celebrate some more I guess.

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shawnmooney
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The cover and title caught my eye at the bookstore yesterday, but I decided not to buy it impulsively. Now that I've seen a bunch of wonderful reviews here and on Goodreads, I may have to go back and get it!

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Ilana
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"We are all sitting around the fireplace talking about how not to get raped." - "She Deserves Everything She Gets" - Dana Johnson.

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Ilana
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What kind of woman breaks a wine bottle on a mantle? Who wrecks her own house like that, exploding glass all over the place, glass landing into crevices, under spaces nobody will likely ever see again? Me, in not that kind of woman. At the end of the day, I wasn't raised that way. But I try to be that kind of woman. Still, I'm stuck on half measures."

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