The Ephemera Collector: A Novel

5 Star Review

Click HERE to Purchase Your Copy Today!

Editorial Book Review:

By Fabiana Barbery

Stacy Nathaniel Jackson built his debut novel the way his protagonist builds her life's work: from fragments. Transcripts. Timelines. Letters. Advertisements. Dream journal doodles. Date-stamped images that stand alone as chapters. The Ephemera Collector is assembled the way an archive is assembled, from the scraps that most people would throw away, and the formal choice is not a gimmick. It is the argument.

Xandria Brown is a curator of African American ephemera at the Huntington Library in near-future Los Angeles, descended from a family of obsessive collectors who took part in the Great Migration. Her work is the preservation of seemingly useless things, the ordinary artifacts of Black life that the official record consistently failed to keep. While she works, her long COVID neurocognitive symptoms worsen quietly in the background, and her healthbots keep reminding her of what her body is doing while her mind is elsewhere. When the Huntington goes into lockdown, the novel opens outward in directions that span centuries, ocean civilizations, and the inner lives of AI systems that are both caring for Xandria and cataloguing her the way she catalogues everything else.

Jackson makes a line between those two acts of collection, the human archivist and the machine archivist, and does not let you stop thinking about which side of it you trust and why. The parallel is precise and genuinely unsettling. Both are keeping records. Both are deciding what matters. Both are doing it with priorities that are not fully transparent to the person being documented.

The Octavia Butler homage the book wears openly is not influence in the soft sense. It is rigorous inheritance, the kind that takes a tradition seriously enough to push it somewhere new. Kirkus called it a daring Afrofuturist debut that just scratches the surface of its own astonishing futures. Jeremy Brett at Ancillary Review of Books declared Jackson a singular new voice in fiction.

Both assessments feel right, and both feel like opening statements about a career worth following closely.

About the Author

Stacy Nathaniel Jackson

Stacy Nathaniel Jackson is a trans writer, poet, playwright, and visual artist originally from Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Callaloo, Electric Literature, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Georgia Review and elsewhere. 

His debut novel The Ephemera Collector was published by Liveright in 2025 and shortlisted for the 2026 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

Allegiance, a docupoetics chapbook, was a finalist for the Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition. 

His Afrofuturist play The Codex of Narma was a semi-finalist for the 2025 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and received a staged reading from the National Queer Theater, with an excerpt performed at Theater Alliance’s 2026 Hothouse New Play Block Party. Intelligence was a semi-finalist for NYCPlaywrights Black Women Genius monologue competition. 

He has received support for his work as a Cave Canem poetry fellow, Hurston/Wright Foundation speculative fiction fellow, Jack Straw Cultural Center Writers Program fellow, Millay Arts Vincent Prize fellow, associate artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency #191 with Addae Moon in performance writing, and recipient of an individual artist grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.