The stories in Rion Amilcar Scott’s collection The World Doesn’t Require You take place in and around the fictional town of Cross River, Maryland, a town established after America’s only successful slave revolt. These are stories about stories, either a Cross Riverian myth or the story is about how stories work, their world and character building, the impact they have on the hearer(s). Scott blurs the lines between realism and fabulism giving the collection as a whole the feel of an unreliable narrator. Sometimes characters are straightforward about when something is made up, but sometimes they're unaware of the stories they tell themselves. This collection has a complicated relationship with women. Some women have agency while others are treated as objects often aligning with the narratives characters believe about themselves and others. These beliefs speak to the recurring theme of loneliness and how characters seek connections in love, friendship, religion, art, and their professions but, as often as not, are their own biggest obstacle. The importance of perspective is linked to education and why several stories take place around academia and other educational institutions. Educators are some of the biggest influences on how we are shaped as people, so what happens when they are ground down by oppression? This is the type of collection where I’m sure I’d find something new with each reread. Though I sometimes got lost in a story's or character's tenuous grasp of reality, I always knew Scott was in control.