My Monticello

by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

Literary Fiction

Short Stories

Dystopian

192 Pages

"My Monticello hit me like a gut punch — quiet and precise and then suddenly devastating. Johnson writes about race and belonging and survival with a clarity I haven't encountered in a debut in years. Absolutely essential."

Synopsis

My Monticello is a debut collection of linked stories and a novella, set largely in the near future and united by characters fighting to find — or hold onto — a place where they belong in an America fraying at its seams.

The eponymous novella follows Da'Naisha, a young Black woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, who leads a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors away from violent white supremacists and toward the only refuge she can think of: Jefferson's historic plantation home at Monticello. The stories surrounding it range widely — a university professor who secretly conducts a clinical study of racism using his own Black son as subject; a Nigerian widower adrift in Alexandria after immigration; a mixed-race woman who sheds her name and accent to escape rural Virginia; a single mother navigating homeownership on the edge of environmental collapse.

Tough-minded, precise, and deeply humane, Johnson's collection explores the weight of inherited history and the relentless human need for belonging — in a place, in a name, in a country that has never fully delivered on its founding promises.

Our Take

Johnson's central conceit — a Jefferson-Hemings descendant seeking refuge in the very house that embodies America's foundational contradictions — is so precisely right that it feels less like a creative invention than an inevitability. But My Monticello earns its power not through the boldness of its premise alone but through the quality of its prose and the specificity of its characters. Johnson writes with a control that never tips into coldness, and her near-future settings feel less like speculation than like an honest account of where the present is already headed.

"Control Negro," the story that drew early attention from writers including Roxane Gay, demonstrates the range on display across the collection: its narrator is unreliable in ways that accumulate slowly, and the story's moral horror arrives not with a shock but with a terrible clarity. That quality — of understanding arriving too late and too completely — runs through the best work here.

Readers drawn to ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere for its unflinching portraits of Black American life, or to Colson Whitehead's Zone One for its use of near-future dystopia to illuminate present-day racial reality, will find My Monticello a powerful companion. One of the most assured debuts in recent American fiction.