The Monkey Suit is David Dante Troutt's "impressive" debut (Kirkus), a collection of short stories inspired by historic legal cases involving African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Monkey Suit addresses issues ranging from Jim Crow segregation ordinances to warrantless private property searches in stories the Washington Post calls "quietly devastating." Troutt brilliantly combines legal scholarship with literature in a book that Claude Brown calls "truly a work of genius."