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Stories from the Tenants Downstairs  By  cover art

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs

By: Sidik Fofana
Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Nile Bullock, Sidik Fofana, Dominic Hoffman, DePre Owens, André Santana, Bahni Turpin, Jade Wheeler
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Publisher's summary

SELECTED FOR THE RUSA 2023 LISTEN LIST FOR OUTSTANDING AUDIOBOOK NARRATION!

WINNER of the Gotham Book Prize * Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award, and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence * Longlisted for the Story Prize

Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Chicago Review of Books, LitHub, and Electric Lit

“A standout achievement…American speech is an underused commodity in contemporary fiction and it’s a joy to find such a vital example of it here.”—The Wall Street Journal

From a superb new literary talent, a rich, lyrical collection of stories about a tight-knit cast of characters grappling with their own personal challenges while the forces of gentrification threaten to upend life as they know it.

At Banneker Terrace, everybody knows everybody, or at least knows of them. Longtime tenants’ lives are entangled together in the ups and downs of the day-to-day, for better or for worse. The neighbors in the unit next door are friends or family, childhood rivals or enterprising business partners. In other words, Harlem is home. But the rent is due, and the clock of gentrification—never far from anyone’s mind—is ticking louder now than ever.

In eight interconnected stories, Sidik Fofana conjures a residential community under pressure. There is Swan, in apartment 6B, whose excitement about his friend’s release from prison jeopardizes the life he’s been trying to lead. Mimi, in apartment 14D, hustles to raise the child she had with Swan, waitressing at Roscoe’s and doing hair on the side. And Quanneisha B. Miles, in apartment 21J, is a former gymnast with a good education who wishes she could leave Banneker for good, but can’t seem to escape the building’s gravitational pull. We root for the tight-knit cast of characters as they weave in and out of one another’s narratives, working to escape their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love. All the while we brace, as they do, for the challenges of a rapidly shifting future.

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs brilliantly captures the joy and pain of the human experience in this “singular accomplishment from a writer to watch” (Library Journal, starred review).

©2022 Sidik Fofana. All rights reserved. (P)2022 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Critic reviews

"After a moody jazz riff, Sidik Fofana and a stand-out cast of performers transport listeners to the Banneker Terrace apartments in Harlem. Written in vibrant Black American vernacular, these witty, sad, uplifting stories are ideal for audio. Joniece Abbott-Pratt’s Mimi is a beautician behind on the rent. Fofana’s Swan might mess up because of a visitor. André Santana’s Darius tries to earn funds by offering therapy instead of prostitution. Bahni Turpin’s Ms. Dallas is a classroom aide bossed too often by a Harvard-educated teacher. DePre Owens’s Kandese manages a candy-selling ring of girls. Nile Bullock’s Najee and pals dance for tips in the subway. Jade Wheeler’s Quanneisha handles residents she doesn’t like. Dominic Hoffman’s Mr. Murray earns money playing chess. They’re all unforgettable."AudioFile Magazine

What listeners say about Stories from the Tenants Downstairs

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blah

struggled to finish. confusing at time. not engaging at all. first couple of stories were ok but it went downhill after that.

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14 people found this helpful

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wow

Devastatingly beautiful. So real and honest
you will see that reality is not always happy endings

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8 people found this helpful

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Please Sidik, can we have some more?

What a great book! I was entertained, enlightened, and plain out loving this book until it ended—way too quickly. I’m hoping the author has more time to hear from his neighbors soon and then gets them submitted for another season. I particularly understood the stories from the classrooms & wow—they were right on. The last story, memorable for other reasons, will echo for a long time. The author is genius in telling others’ stories.

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8 people found this helpful

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Our Story

The story of our neighbors is our story. I enjoyed reading & listening to this collection. Lite feet was my favorite!

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7 people found this helpful

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Creative stories

This reminds me of a Netflix series with characters to follow through each episode. Don’t expect feel good endings but get a good dose of reality with a touch of honey.

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Interesting

An interesting collection of interwoven stories from different perspectives of tenants in the same building. I enjoyed the range of style and storytelling in this

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Terrible

I tried multiple times to give this book a chance. It's terrible. A hot freaking mess. Save your money.

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Beautiful Community Tale

I’d recommend this collection to anyone who enjoyed the Rabbit Hutch. Similar story of a low-income community.

I enjoyed the colorful narrative voices and realistic vernacular.

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Inside Stories

Fascinating glimpse at peoples' lives in a Harlem high-rise ... whether true or imagined, you'll enjoy them all!

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Slices of Harlem Life: “Is it despair or prevail?”

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs (2022) is a set of eight slice of life tales depicting various inhabitants of Banneker Terrace apartment building in Harlem: Mimi, a young single mother trying multiple strategies to come up with $350 for rent, hindered by her sweet lead poison brain damaged little son Fortune; Swan, the boy’s father still living in his mother’s apartment realizing that despite a black president he and his freshly out of prison friend will never really change; Ms. Dallas, Swan’s mother trying to earn rent money while working two jobs, one as “para” chaperoning a special needs child at the precarious Sojourner Truth Middle School; an anonymous girl living in Clinton and mutely falling under the spell of Kandese, who, after being expelled from Sojourner Truth, stays the summer with her grandmother; Dary, a young gay man trying to become a hairdresser while not becoming a prostitute; Najee, a twelve-year-old writing a letter explaining how he came to start dancing for money on trains and cause a tragic accident; Neisha, an ex-gymnast and university dropout returning to Banneker to work on the Committee of Concern connecting a lawyer to residents on the eviction list (including the childhood friend who ruined her gymnastics dream); and Mr. Murray, a philosophical old man who likes keeping a low profile and sitting on the sidewalk playing chess with passersby.

Many of the stories end abruptly without our learning how the protagonist is going to be. We get hints as to that when characters from earlier stories are referenced in later ones, but the stories are not linked plot-wise. In Swan’s story, he never mentions his son or Mimi; in Najee’s story, he doesn’t really mention Kandese; in Ms. Dallas’ story, she never mentions her grandson or Mimi). It’s not a composite novel.

The stories mostly lack epiphanies and metamorphoses and often end on a note of quiet devastation. The characters have their dreams, but we know (and they mostly come to know) they ain’t coming true. The rap-like “Intro” ends, “Everybody got a story, everybody got a tale/ Question is: Is it despair or prevail?” And Fofana’s people rarely “prevail.” So I wince whenever a character says something like, “Imma get a job and buy a house for my mother.” I also get frustrated at key moments when the sensitive but often passive characters know they should say or do something but end up staying silent or watching. Fofana is showing how the difficult and stressful lives of people of color drain positive vigor from them, and it often makes for depressing reading.

On the plus side, some of the characters have an impressively uncompromising pride and ethical standard. Although when pushed to it Mimi will charge double to do her friend’s daughter’s hair and use her son’s backpack to shoplift diapers, she will NOT move back home with her tail between her legs to live with her mother and four sisters on welfare; although Dary will have sex with a stranger in a DC hotel room, he will NOT take money for it. Small moments of resistance and integrity if not victory.

These are stories FROM the tenants, so seven of them are first person, one second person, and each has a distinctive, savory, demotic, AAVE voice talking to the reader, like in this excerpt from the first story, “Rent Manual—Mimi, 14D”:

“Banneker Terrace on 129th and Fred Doug ain't pretty, but it's home. Until now, it's been the same since you moved here when you was pregnant with Fortune. One long gray-ass building, twenty-five floors, three hundred suttin apartments. Four elevators that got minds of they own. Laundry full of machines that don't wash clothes right. Bingo room that the old folks hog up and a trash chute that smell like rotten milk.”

Fofana writes conversations without quotation marks:

You gonna go over there and live by yourself? Your ma asked.
That’s what I said, Ma, didn’t I?
Chase after a man that don’t want nothin to do with no baby? And how you gonna make for rent?
Imma get a job like responsible people.
I heard that before.

And he writes lots of the n word and lots of the mf word and lots of slang and expressions like “be like that's what I'm tryna say,” or “I know suttin that make you happy,” or “big-ass pot.”

The distinct voices of the character-narrators are enhanced by each story having a different—excellent—audiobook reader. My favorite is Dominic Hoffman as the old chess playing Mr. Murray (what a savory voice!), but Bahni Turpin as Mimi is also great.

There is some telling social criticism, like about liberal white people naively thinking they can enrich ghetto kids’ lives by making them read literature* or about the trend in companies forcing low-income residents out and renovating apartments to get higher paying ones and upscale restaurants replacing older ones.

*Actually, young and white Mr. Broderick, who constantly boasts about graduating from Harvard, force feeds Steinbeck and Shakespeare to the poor Sojourner Truth kids, and unfairly resents and scorns Ms. Dallas is a little too clueless to believe.

As I am white, grew up comfortably, and only once temporarily got a mild taste of poverty (living on a TA’s salary in graduate school) and disappointment (having my cv rejected 300 times), it was illuminating, moving, and sobering to read these stories.

I would read another book by Fofana.

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