What a fantastic book! It is a book of stories but these stories are full of messages around race, gender, spirituality, and magic. There is a unique blend of funny, sad, tense, upsetting and odd things happening throughout the book. Creative is an understatement!

Fellow white people: this might not be a book to listen to on audiobook, or at least you might want to be mindful of where/how you listen to this book as the N-word is used copiously throughout this collection.

I'm not sure what to say about this collection, and I wasn't even sure that I wanted to rate it until I finished the satire of Academia, "Special Topics in Loneliness Studies." This collection is filled up to the brim with bad and cowardly men. Well, bad men and a bad robot. Combined with a certain sharp edge to the stories, there is little pleasure in this text. This is a collection obsessed with the ways in which its protagonists lie to themselves as much as they lie to others.

All of this takes place in the cunningly-rendered fictional location of Cross River, MD, a city formed through a successful slave revolt that is still trying to figure out what to do next. Scott lays down the layers of myth and fable in Cross River, with the earlier stories serving as framing and filling in background information for "Special Topics...", the novella at the end of the collection.

I'm still digesting how I feel about this collection. Hm.

• collection of short stories centered around the fictional town (city?) of cross river
• i think overall this book was simply not for me. i felt like i just didn't "get" a lot of the stories which is maybe on me
• also found it really difficult to get through a lot of the stories due to the misogynistic characters. honestly in general throughout the book the female characters feel like cardboard cutouts, just there to be viewed as whores/bitches/mothers by the men who clearly do not see them as people
• it just became too much at a certain point for some of the stories and i had to skim to the ends of a few
• however there were two stories in here that i really loved and went back to re-read: "The Electric Joy of Service" and "A Rare and Powerful Employee"
• both of these were so, so powerful and succinct and thought-provoking

I'm once again beyond thrilled to have discovered Rion Amilcar Scott's writing in Out There Screaming.

I read Insurrections first, as for whatever reason, I was unaware of the existence of this book. When the author was kind enough to point this out to me, I purchased it as soon as I got my next paycheck.

There is so much praise I could laud onto Rion Amilcar Scott's shoulders: the depth of the prose's poeticness, the humanity behind the text, the characters that seem torn from real life. This one (unless I am remembering Insurrections incorrectly) has a dialogue between them. Whether overtly through shared characters, or through subtle references, this truly makes Cross River come aive. Of course, Insurrections had shared locations/town geography, but I thought this collection connected differently. This is not to detract from the second one, however. This book just has its own particular strengths.

Also, there is some toying with genre in this edition. Sci-fi, horror, historical-fiction, and magical realism infiltrate this collection to outstanding effect. Speaking of horror, this collection had the prequel, as it were, to the story in Out There Screaming.

It's hard to pick a story as my favorite, as a lot of them (as I mentioned) are either successors or spiritual successors to one another. With that being said, if I had to pick one, it would be the ending novella, "Special Topics in Lonliness." Apart from being enthralled by the story, I saw familair names from my own studies like bell hooks and Paulo Freire, which was pretty neat.

Anyways, if you haven't read Rion Amilcar Scott, I highly, highly, highly recommend it.

3.5 stars

Scott's collection of short stories was hit or miss for me. I love bizarre story collections, and Scott's Cross River is the perfect locale for such stories. Cross River is the central through line, and practically the protagonist of The World Doesn't Require You. This is partly due to Scott's ability to paint the setting so vividly with his words, but it's also partly due to a lack of interesting characters. I found that the most interesting stories were often the shortest, and the ones which dragged were far longer than necessary. Take the novella which serves as the second half of this collection for example. The most interesting character in this novella is a student who isn't featured until the very end. The fifty or so pages it takes to get there felt too much like window dressing. Scott is a gifted writer. I plan to read his other works. I imagine taking in his stories singularly would leave a greater impression on me than they did as a collection.

A collection of stories that builds up a world in its first half—to varying degrees of success—and then gives you space to live in it in the finale of Special Topics in Loneliness Studies. I was blown away by this opportunity to inhabit Cross River for a while.

Scott has done it again! He explores similar themes that he explored in his first collection Insurrections but goes deeper on some others such as isolation and loneliness. I think he does a great job exploring how being oppressed (through the lens of Black men in America) can lead to you being the oppressor due to the loneliness and frustration you feel. Fantastic read can’t wait to see what Scott does next!

This is definitely a 4-4.5 read for me! One gripe I had was just the personal reading experience of not having the book physically in front of me! I listened to this audiobook via Scribd, and although I can usually go without the physical book, I think the reading experience and my better understanding of it would've been heightened if I read and listened to it at the same time.

That being said though, the story is still extremely gripping. I am definitely considering rereading this because of how the story wrapped up with the Special Topics in Loneliness class that is a culmination of all of the stories and perspectives from before which isn't something I was expecting. I think that story, and the robot Jim story (tw for racial slurs, including the n-word by characters) are my two favorites in how extreme the stories felt.

Overall, REALLY glad I listened to this, and really adored the narrator too!

Man, I don’t even LIKE fiction any more and I loved this.