MARTHA’S DAUGHTER: A NOVELLA AND STORIES

This is a preorder. Martha’s Daughter will be released in September of this year, with copies mailing prior to release. To get the five previous Of the Diaspora titles in one bundle, click here.

Martha’s Daughter is the brilliant and influential author David Haynes’s first short story collection and the first time that Haynes’s stories have ever been assembled in one volume. Steeped in everyday gossip and lives, this collection ranges from the magically real life of a city’s crumbling superhero to a rundown motel whose long-term guests are lucky to call home. In the titular novella the first hours are chronicled after Cynthia finds out her mother has died. What we learn is that Cynthia is a woman who has been bullied by her mother’s overbearing opinions, her disdain for difference, her respectability politics, and her outdated beliefs about how men and women should relate to one another. Martha’s death is less a catalyst for Cynthia’s grief than an opportunity to free herself of a burden too long endured.

The sixth in McSweeney’s Of the Diaspora series, Martha’s Daughter is another record in David’s oeuvre, of the people and places he’s been recording since the beginning of his career, some thirty years ago. With its full-circle connection to David’s previous novels, Martha’s Daughter is guaranteed to enthrall longtime fans and new readers alike.

Praise for Martha’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories

“David Haynes is a master storyteller—intelligent, insightful, generous, and wickedly funny. Martha’s Daughter is a delight from beginning to end.”
—Natalie Baszile, author of Queen Sugar

“Martha’s Daughter tells the stories of women whose ambitions of a better future for themselves are by turns fostered and frustrated by women close to them. David Haynes brings these relationships to life with great sensitivity, rare beauty, and sharp wit. This book is an absolute triumph.”
—Laila Lalami, author of The Moor’s Account

“All of the pieces in Martha’s Daughter offer this type of delicious, raw confrontation, between not only characters but the worlds those characters represent… Haynes’s exquisite sense of structure leaves readers breathless with joy.”
—Jacinda Townsend, author of Trigger Warning

About Of the Diaspora

McSweeney’s Of the Diaspora is a series of important works of twentieth-century art and literature by Black writers whose themes, settings, characterizations, and conflicts evoke an experience, language, imagery, and power born of the Middle Passage and the particular aesthetic which connects African-derived peoples to a shared artistic and ancestral past. The series is edited by writer Erica Vital-Lazare, a professor of creative writing and marginalized voices in literature at the College of Southern Nevada.