Seventy stories by Black writers from around the world, half from the U.S. In William Melvin Kelley's My Next-to-Last Hit, a Harvard-educated killer engages in a philosophical discussion with his victim before shooting him, Pauline Melville's I Do Not Take Messages from Dead People is on the fate of a radio reporter in Guyana who insults the vice-president, and Ernest J. Gaines' Three Men is on jail as a rite-of-passage for Blacks in becoming men.