Gorilla, My Love
Bambara's stories in Black vernacular speech were a revelation: funny, furious, and politically alive. Toni Morrison called her "one of our most gifted writers." These stories anticipated the voice of an entire generation.
Gorilla, My Love asks a lot up front: the Black vernacular dialogue that admirers call “a gloriously melodic, vernacular style” takes real effort for outsiders to enter, and yet another reader reports losing meaning in places and gathering sense from context rather than actually catching it. The fifteen stories run only a handful of pages each, so a reviewer who admires how Bambara “is able to capture a moment or a feeling” also admits wanting to stay longer with characters the book only glimpses before moving on. “Survivor” draws the sharpest frustration: memory, film, and present action blur without clear markers, and some say the story never fully resolves; even a careful reread leaves the plot only partly clear. The middle stretch sags too, with the strongest work concentrated at the front and back.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
