Miss Muriel and Other Stories - Softcover

ANN PETRY (1908–1997) was a reporter, pharmacist, social worker, and community activist. She illuminated the range of black and white experience in her novels, short stories, and other writing. Her book The Street was the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.

JAMILAH LEMIEUX is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in a host of venues, including Mic, Ebony, The Nation, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Guardian, Gawker, and her now-defunct award-winning blog, The Beautiful Struggler.

"Miss Muriel and Other Stories adds more tenor to questions that surely have haunted fans of [Petry's] novels . . . Black women’s voices matter, yet they are often silenced, ignored, or relegated to the margins of popular discourse . . . Some eight decades after Ann Petry penned the first words that would make their way into Miss Muriel, let us give her the audience she deserves."  —Jamilah Lemieux, from the foreword 

"But Petry's stories, like her novels, refuse to settle for easy truths. In Miss Muriel, individuals, their relationships with others, and their communities are clearly formed by human bias, not just harmed by it." —Hilary Holladay, author of Tipton

“Ann Petry is an important, if underappreciated, American writer. The first to provide emotionally complex portraits of urban working-class African Americans, particularly women, Petry wrote fiction that is original, compelling, and timeless. Her political and aesthetic sensibilities continue to inform and influence new generations of writers, critics, and literary theorists.”--Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University

"Miss Muriel and Other Stories is timeless. Petry's sense of place, subtly drawn characters, and exploration of complex ethical questions, especially when race and gender collide, make these classic examples of the American short story."—Barbara Smith, author of The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom