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The following is an excerpt from an unpublished novel manuscript by Kathleen Collins (1942–1988). You can read Alix Beeston’s introduction to the work on the Daily here.

This room: contains all the dampness in the world. The sheets are dirty. The floor is cold. Rain runs down the gutters. A step away the door opens and a light clicks. Someone climbs the stairs. The light goes out, leaving them in darkness. I’m in a romantic French hovel.

A taxi brought me here in the middle of the night. You carried in my luggage, smoking your pipe and grunting while I kissed you and inhaled the damp odor about you of tobacco and mildew. It was a thrilling moment. I have just arrived in my light blue knit fringed in green, looking like a brown nun. A rough net of black hair controls my face and my eyes focus poorly on things … now on your pointed shoes … now on the unmade bed … now on the dampness, the clutter of your romantic French hovel.

Everything is coming to me fresh through your tinted glasses, your severely pointed shoes. You talk about Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, the New York School of poets. I’ve never heard of Andy Warhol, nor Frank O’Hara. It is coming to me fresh, while I settle inside the full pout of your lips and inhale the dampness. You have … an odor about you … an odor about you … all these years I have followed in the wake of an odor about you …

It is a stitched composition notebook in a classic style: speckled, with a black-and-white cover. Burnished by time, it’s also patterned by a network of surface fissures, corrugated marks, and mottled shapes yellowing to gold. At some point the notebook appears to have been bent back on itself—crushed, perhaps, in the bottom of a bag or a drawer. I can only make out some of the words written on the front in blue ballpoint: “NOVEL,” confident in capitals, and what I’m pretty sure is the year “1974.”

The notebook belongs to Kathleen Collins, the Black American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and activist whose body of creative work was mostly unpublished and unproduced prior to her death from cancer, at forty-six years of age, in 1988. Beginning with the long-delayed 2015 theatrical release of her feature film, the 1982 independent drama Losing Ground, Collins’s work has found the broad public audience it didn’t during her lifetime. Her posthumous acclaim has been secured largely through the work of her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, who, as a nineteen-year-old in 1988, gathered her mother’s papers from her house and stashed them in a large trunk. They stayed there for many years until she felt ready to sort through them.

When she did, it was a revelation. Nina discovered a trove of typewritten manuscripts, including dozens of short stories, plays, and screenplays, in which her mother composed sharply observed fictions of Black middle-class life. Those manuscripts now form the spine of Collins’s official archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library; they’re also the basis of the two published volumes of Collins’s writing that Nina edited, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (2016) and Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary (2019).

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I first became aware of the New Haven, Connecticut, coke plant when, one evening, I looked out from the roof of the Yale architecture school and noticed a distant, enormous cloud of steam—so thick it looked like one could climb into it—somewhere near the harbor. After a while I realized the cloud appeared at almost exact forty-five-minute intervals. I biked to the harbor and saw the source on the far shore: a huge black form rising out of the yellow marsh grass into a marvelous configuration of towers connected to diagonal shaftways, all held aloft on spindly steel columns and cross-bracing that looked like the elegant legs of a giant praying mantis.

The belching steam emanated from somewhere in its interior. I made some distant drawings. I was in my first year of architecture school, in 1966, and this building was where industrial coke was produced. Later, under the cover of night, I crossed the harbor bridge. There were no gates or fences surrounding the complex. I found my way in, and I was quickly immersed in the most all-consuming physical environment in which I had ever been. I wandered through, first past some sheds. Between them were inscrutable contraptions that looked like giant robots, working in what I would slowly understand was a choreographed rhythm, moving the coal and coke, apparently independent of any human intervention. This apparatus clanked, crunched, and squeaked loudly. Blasts of steam erupted unpredictably from underground sources. In sheds built over the railroad tracks, one could hear the rattle, escalating to a roar, of the coal and coke being deposited into huge steel bins.

Toward the shore there was an enormous field of silhouetted mountains of coal, illuminated by a hazy mist. A huge gantry crane with a double truss, held some sixty feet above by two steel vertical trussed towers, spanned the hundred-yard-wide field of coal, gliding along the field’s approximately quarter-mile length on railroad tracks at each side. A huge bucket dropped the coal arriving from barges onto the shore in piles. The same bucket picked the coal up again to feed it into a chute, and from there it was emptied onto a conveyor belt and distributed to the ovens to be burned into coke. The gantry looked like another type of gigantic, strange animated insect. In the far distance, on the shore, other cranes hovered over barges in the harbor filled with incoming coal.

The coke factory represented for me, with overwhelming force, an embrace of darkness and shadows. Everything I could see around me when I was there was blacker than the night, until suddenly, coming around the corner, there would be a raging ball of fire and smoke, flickering shadows everywhere, and then, a few moments later, a thick, expanding mass of steam levitating into the sky in a convoluted, glowing mushroom shape. The fire came from the emptying of one of the hundred and seventy ovens, aligned side by side, where the coal was burned and transformed into coke. Just as charcoal burns hotter than wood, so does coke burn hotter than coal, and thus coke was better for use in steel mills—its eventual destination.

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Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor

From Ann Rower’s Lee & Elaine (Semiotext(e)), first published by Serpent’s Tail in 2002:

For months after she’d put her signature bubblegum vaginas on his mailbox.

From Daniel Poppick’s The Copywriter (Scribner):