My Summer of Discontent

“It seems like white folks got it made,” says Smokey Bivens, one of the characters in My Summer of Discontent, a collection of short stories by Ken Walker. The stories are set in the inner city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the fifties and sixties. Mercer Bevenue is the narrator in the book, and he recalls how he and his friends navigated growing up impoverished in a city that tried to repress their growth through racism, segregation, and discrimination. Mercer approaches life with a sense of humor and uses the game he loves, basketball, as a way to distract himself from the reality of living in conditions that are often distressing.