"Bestselling author Walter Mosley has proven himself a master of narrative tension, both with his extraordinary fiction and gripping writing for television. The Awkward Black Man collects seventeen of Mosley's most accomplished short stories to display the full range of his remarkable talent. Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories - heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved,...

A collection of stories follows four young men as they come of age in a Rhode Island postindustrial enclave and struggle to liberate themselves from the limitations imposed on African Americans while navigating the dynamics of sex, drugs, class, and family.