The Office of Historical Corrections

A Novella and Stories

By: Danielle Evans

Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo, Brittany Pressley, Janina Edwards, January LaVoy, Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Nicole Lewis, Shayna Small

'Sublime short stories of race, grief, and belonging . . . an extraordinary new collection'
New Yorker

'Evans’s new stories present rich plots reflecting on race relations, grief, and love'
New York Times, Editor’s Choice

‘Brilliant . . . These stories are sly and prescient, a nuanced reflection of the world we are living in’
Roxane Gay

Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and X-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history.

We meet Black and multi-racial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief – all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history – about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.

In ‘Boys Go to Jupiter’ a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate flag bikini goes viral. In ‘Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain’ a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend’s unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a Black scholar from Washington DC is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.

Critic reviews

A dazzling dissection of our twisted attitudes about race, culture, history, and truth.

Each story in this superb collection offers an observation of modern life that feels urgent and vital, and confirms Evans’ place as one of the most electric and insightful voices writing today.

There’s an elegant, barely suppressed emotional explosiveness to Danielle Evans’s sublime storytelling. . . Fear and fierceness, grief and grievance push-pull Evans’s complex, entirely convincing characters in every conceivable direction.

With the seven brilliant stories in The Office of Historical Corrections, Danielle Evans demonstrates, once again, that she is the finest short story writer working today. These stories are sly and prescient, a nuanced reflection of the world we are living in . . . wickedly smart and haunting. (Roxane Gay)

Evans makes important points about race and history, but this is not to undermine the lightness of her touch . . . It is only as you reach the end that you realise the razor-sharp stories in this collection are all in dialogue, cleverly and satisfyingly upending notions of victimhood.

The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans reminds me why I love short fiction . . . Evans is blessed with perfect pitch when it comes to dialogue – both in terms of what is spoken and what goes unsaid. (Tayari Jones)

Danielle Evans is a wonder . . . She writes about the stakes of contemporary life in a way that always feels so true and so right. You leave her stories feeling like you’ll miss those characters forever. She is a writer of the first order. (Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life)

Evans' prose presents something of a rarity in contemporary fiction: where sure and deft craft meet real feeling. Her stories grip and amuse, cutting to the essence of what might mean to be Black in America. (Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Open Water)

Evans’s storytelling shines . . . her characters are sharp, with terrific depth, and her prose is a pleasure to read.

Blistering stories of Black lives that set the record straight . . . One of the saving graces of the last few years is the abundance of sharp fiction that deftly dramatizes racial injustice and division in this country. Evans goes further than most.

What makes a good short story? Danielle Evans' dynamite new collection proves a study in the form. Slices of life, each piece in Corrections captures its own mood, hums to distinct rhythms, and locates unique spaces for empathy and pain and catharsis. They're also delectably readable, propulsive accounts of loss and fear and redemption that twist with O. Henry-level glee.

The most astonishing thing I’ve read this fall.