Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
One of the most celebrated debut collections in recent American literature. Packer's stories about Black experience, from a Girl Scout troop in Baltimore to a young woman at Yale, combine social precision with narrative surprise.
Quality is uneven story to story, and several readers say nothing after Brownies fully matches its opening high. The Ant of the Self, the Million Man March story and the collection's one tale from a male narrator's point of view, is singled out as the weak link, read as more conventional than the rest. Speaking in Tongues, the Atlanta runaway story, splits readers hard: some call it the strongest story in the book, others say it “demonstrates the dangers of loose plotting.” A few readers call specific choices implausible, singling out “the stupidity of the characters in the story in Japan” as especially hard to buy. Endings draw a real complaint too, with readers pointing to “several stories which end in places that feel almost entirely random.” A cranky, recurring gripe holds that “Every story seems so hung up on race” that it crowds out other material and tips into moralizing.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
