Loyalty is so excited to celebrate the release of Give My Love To The Savages with Chris Stuck and Chanelle Benz! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event with a donation of any amount of your choice or you can order the book below to be added to the event's registration list. Donations will go to BLM DC. There will also be an option to snag the book during the event.

A provocative and raw debut collection of short fiction reminiscent of Junot Diaz’s Drown. A Black man’s life, told in scenes of every time he’s been called nigger. A Black boy contending with his identity while growing up in the Witness Protection Program. A Black Republican copes with a skin disease that has turned him white. Chris Stuck masterfully balances the absurd with the starkly realistic in his debut, Give My Love to the Savages (Amistad; July 6, 2021; $25.99). The nine tales in the book illuminate the multifaceted Black experience, exploring the thorny intersections of race, identity, and Black life through an extraordinary cast of characters. Each story considers a marker of our current culture, from uprisings and sly and not-so-sly racism, to Black fetishization and conservatism, to the obstacles placed in front of Black masculinity and Black and interracial relationships by society and circumstance. Setting these stories across America, Stuck uses place to expose the absurdity of race and the odd ways that Black people and white people converge and retreat, rub against and bump into one another: Give My Love to the Savages contains the story of America. With biting humor and careful honesty, Stuck riffs on the dichotomy of love and barbarity—the yin and yang of racial experience—and the difficult and uncertain terrain Black Americans must navigate in pursuit of their desires.

Chris Stuck is a freelance writer and editor living in Portland, Oregon. He earned an MFA in Fiction from George Mason University. He has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop, and the Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship. He is a Pushcart Prize winner, and his work has been published or is forthcoming in American Literary Review, Bennington Review, Cagibi, Callaloo, Meridian, Natural Bridge, and StoryQuarterly.

Chanelle Benz has published work in Guernica, Granta.com, The New York Times, Electric Literature, The American Reader, The Harvard Review, Fence, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. Her story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead was named a Best Book of 2017 by The San Francisco Chronicle and one of Electric Literature’s 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2017. It was also shortlisted for the 2018 Saroyan Prize and longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction as well as the 2017 Story Prize. Her novel The Gone Dead was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and a Tonight Show Summer Reads Finalist. It was longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and longlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was also named a best new book of the summer by O, The Oprah Magazine, Time, Southern Living, and Nylon.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Chris Stuck and Chanelle Benz for GIVE MY LOVE TO THE SAVAGES