A debut collection that ranges in length, style, and tone—Some of Them Will Carry Me is a collage of social commentary, surrealism, recipes, folklore, and art. What brings these stories together is a focus on the experiences of Black women in moments of dislocation, and a cinematic prose style 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, wet cardboard, a woman walking naked through a traffic tunnel. In language that is lyrical, minimal, and often absurd, the stories in Some of Them Will Carry Me deconstruct contemporary life while building a surprising new reality of language, intimacy, and loss.
Out now from Dorothy, a publishing project.
Excerpts from Some of Them Will Carry Me:
“540i” in Astra Magazine, Issue 2: Filth (November 2022)
“Three Months of Banana” in LitHub (October 2022)
“The Foot of the Tan Building” and “Cabbage, The Highest Arch” in Bookforum (October 2022)
“The Ethics of Piracy” in BOMB (October 2022)
“Peach” in Harper’s Magazine (September 2022)
“Barbershop” in Granta (August 2022)
“A Triangle” in The New Yorker (July 2022)
“Hangnails, and Other Diseases” in The White Review (April 2017)
Praise for Some of Them Will Carry Me:
“This is a book of wonders, full of intricate beauty, and Giada Scodellaro is an extraordinary talent.” —Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
“In Some of Them Will Carry Me Giada Scodellaro enthralls as she evokes the best of the lushly slow and quiet European films of the 1960s, with their long, wide, starkly gorgeous shots, deeply detached yet viscerally sensual plotlines, and lonely meandering figures crossing landscapes. But what is more powerful is how she reorganizes those canonized spaces to foreground the subject-ness of brown bodies and to imbue her female characters with volition. It’s a virtuosic reframing, done with seductive and disarming brevity. A stunning debut.” —Renee Gladman, author of The Activist
"Riveting, evocative, written with intensity and purpose, these potent, self-contained fictions have a vitality all their own—and they announce the arrival of a brilliant new voice in literature." —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
“The female protagonists who appear in Scodellaro’s kinetic début collection of stories find themselves in absurdist and fantastical scenarios that interrogate the nature of subjectivity.” The New Yorker, “The Best Books of 2022”
“…[Scodellaro] brings in such a magic extra-dimensionality, opening up huge new spaces, even as she is somehow busily compressing everything. The language is brilliant and stripey with beauty and a pushing-back-against sickness.” Barbara Epler, TANK
“This debut collection is not to be missed. Some as short as a paragraph, or even a sentence, Scodellaro’s stories capture a broad spectrum of life’s joy, disgust, complexity, and unusual specificity. . . . Readers encountering this extraordinary book for the first time will rejoice.” Booklist, starred review
“Scodellaro debuts with a wild and wonderful collection of surreal and enigmatic accounts of sex, relationships, and encounters with strangers. . . . It’s an auspicious and consistently surprising first outing.” Publishers Weekly, starred review
“These are Black characters whose existence in their surreal landscape is as natural as the soft mentions of cocoa butter on thighs. A world immediately recognizable even in its strangeness. A world confident in and of itself. These are the soft and fragrant spaces of the dreams of Black writers and readers alike. The wholeness of the marginalized existence, what it is like inside the body and inside the love when not viewed from the outside.” Georgie Fehringer, The Rumpus
“In these brief, visually rich, often fable-like stories, Giada Scodellaro establishes a striking and unpredictable voice…Scodellaro’s work shows an interest in texture and earth, in the way sand shifts and clings, the way it follows people home through their clothes and their bodies…It is a wonderful series of transformations that mirror the act of writing and revising, of surveying the options and making a choice, as Scodellaro has done here in this superb collection.” Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Harvard Review
“Scodellaro’s power and gift lie in her uncommon inventiveness, in how sensitively and patiently she plumbs narrative potentialities of a single moment. This singular, captivating debut story collection tethers one unique, explosive moment to another, and then another. The way life is lived.” Julia Brown, Gulf Coast
“Some of Them Will Carry Me contains thirty-five stories, none like the last. Many are short: gut-punches and tilt-a-whirls and cold plunges. They are immersive, rapid experiences with an impact disproportionate to their length.” Maggie Lange, Purse Book newsletter
SOME OF THEM WILL CARRY ME, COVER ART
Two Women 3, 2021 by Tschabalala Self
Tschabalala Self is a New Haven-based painter. She received her B.A. from Bard College in 2012 and her M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art in 2015. See more of her work, here.