In Téa Mutonji‘s disarming debut story collection Shut Up You’re Pretty, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides to shave her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic.

These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator’s experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humour, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed.

This is the first book to be published under VS. Books, a series curated and edited by writer/musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of colour.

Téa Mutonji is a writer and poet. She has been awarded and published by Scarborough Fair magazine in fiction and non-fiction and by the Ontario Book Publishers Organization as a Scarborough Emerging Writer in the 2017 “What’s Your Story?” contest. She is finishing her minor in creative writing. Shut Up You’re Pretty is her first book.

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