Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

Is this a new book, or an old one? The stories were written in the 1970s, but not published until now, long after Collins's death at age 46 in 1988 and a year after her groundbreaking feature film, Losing Ground, was brought back into circulation. They sound as fresh now as they must have when they were written, with an ease with voices and with the way social questions work themselves out over kitchen tables that reminds me of no one so much as the great Grace Paley. Collins's characters test the edges of race and class, trying on (or fighting for) names like "negro" and "bourgeois" and "professor" and "artist" and often finding their freedom within those words is not what they'd hoped.