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Somewhere on the internet is a two-hour video of a lecture by the late writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins, author of the short story collection Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (posthumously published in 2017) In the footage, filmed in 1984 at Howard University, Collins is magnetic She emits warmth as well as deep seriousness And although she would be dead four years later – losing her life to cancer at the age of 46 – one of the questions she poses to her black students continues to reverberate ‘How do we,’ she dares, ‘divest ourselves of the need to make ourselves extraordinary?’ Collins was speaking as much about black lives as she was about black fiction In Heads of the Colored People, an intricate, playful debut short story collection from Nafissa Thompson-Spires, we are able to observe some answers A whole palette of them   Take Riley, for example, a character we meet in the titular opening story ‘Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology’  He appears sporting blue contact lenses and gel-slicked, bleached-blonde hair The narrator, deft and ironic like a much cooler friend, is quick to add that Riley is also… black Not only this, but  (just in case we were thinking it), this is neither a story about ‘any kind of self-hatred thing’, nor about ‘the shame of being alive’ Contrary to any hasty assumptions about his sense of blackness, gender or sexual orientation, we are made aware that Riley simply has a love for comic book characters – and is merely on his way to a convention dressed as one   Setting the tone for the entirety of the collection, Thompson-Spires crafts a narrative voice which always walks one step ahead, sometimes turning to us with a wink, before getting back to what really needs to be said Which is that the characters in this book are allowed to be idiosyncratic They are freed by the metafictional narration from burdens of representation, reader projections, or the need to be taken as symbols You won’t find any Serenas or Beyoncés in the collection