The Monkey Suit
“Rich and engaging” (Emerge) short stories on African Americans and the law in the tradition of Derrick Bell and Richard Wright
“Time for serious praise and celebration: David Dante Troutt arrives with the persuasion of Richard Wright, the imagination of Jean Toomer, and an original, fierce intellect all his own! The Monkey Suit will seize you by the short hairs and overtake your heart.” —June Jordan
The Monkey Suit is David Dante Troutt’s “impressive” debut (Kirkus), a collection of short stories inspired by historic legal cases involving African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Monkey Suit addresses issues ranging from Jim Crow segregation ordinances to warrantless private property searches in stories the Washington Post calls “quietly devastating.” Troutt brilliantly combines legal scholarship with literature in a book that Claude Brown calls “truly a work of genius.”
