A wonderful set of 16 stories that covers a lot of ground and features many genres—from myth and folklore to the postmodern...
Short fiction by some of Africa’s most talented writers.
Since 2000, the annual Caine Prize in African Writing has celebrated some of the most innovative and evocative English-language short fiction by African writers. This collection, which features the five stories shortlisted for this year's prize, as well as 11 stories written during the 2017 Caine Prize Writers’ Workshop, held in Tanzania, continues that tradition. The anthology opens impressively with “Who Will Greet You At Home,” one of two stories by Lesley Nneka Arimah (author of Kirkus Prize finalist What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, 2017), a harrowing and subtly complex tale about a young girl whose obsession with becoming a mother has dire consequences. The often fraught relationship between parent and child is a theme found in several other pieces, including Darla Rudakaubana’s painful “Family Ties” and Lydia Kasese’s surprising “My Mother’s Project,” an exploration of the limits of perspective that unveils what it means to see one’s parents as complicated people. The prize winner, Bushra al-Fadil’s “The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away,” is a vibrant delineation of a summer day in the market and a fateful encounter. Agazit Abate’s “Fidel,” a humorous recounting of the main character’s breakup with her boyfriend and her immense love for Fidel Castro, adds levity to the collection. Love and sexuality are also expertly explored in Arinze Ifeakandu’s achingly beautiful “God’s Children are Little Broken Things” and Daniel Rafiki’s speculative fiction, “Five Is Not Half of Ten,” which will leave readers asking the proverbial, What happened next? Indeed, all the authors render their stories well, building hauntingly familiar or fascinatingly new worlds and exploring them creatively.
A wonderful set of 16 stories that covers a lot of ground and features many genres—from myth and folklore to the postmodern and experimental—in a way that will surely satisfy readers.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56656-034-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
A masterpiece that well merits this fresh, engaging translation, which marks its author’s 700th birthday.
A much-translated tale of plagues, priestly malfeasance, courtly love and the Seven Deadly Sins finds a satisfying new version in English.
The Decameron, as its Greek-derived name suggests, is a cycle of stories told over a period of 10 days by Florentines fleeing their city for the countryside in order to escape the devastating Black Death of 1348. Perched at the very point of transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the author of those stories, Giovanni Boccaccio, was a narrative innovator: As translator Rebhorn notes in his long, circumstantial introduction, medieval readers were fond of grab bags of stories, but “there is no precedent in Italian literature for Boccaccio’s use of a frame narrative to unify his collection.” Boccaccio borrowed liberally from previously published anthologies, but as Rebhorn also shows, he added plenty of new twists and arranged his material to form a thematic arc: Day 1, for instance, centers on characters who got out of trouble thanks to their native wit, while Day 4 centers on the character flaws that keep people from getting what they want. What so many of his characters want, it happens, are things frowned upon in polite society, as his ribald tale of the poor cuckolded owner of a conveniently large barrel so richly shows. Rebhorn’s translation of Boccaccio’s sprawling narrative, accompanied by informative endnotes, is sometimes marked by odd shifts in levels of diction, often within the same sentence (“That’s when I felt the guy was going too far...and it seemed to me that I should tell you about it so that you could see how he rewards you for that unwavering fidelity of yours”); it is otherwise clear and idiomatic, however, and Rebhorn capably represents Boccaccio’s humor and sharp intelligence.
A masterpiece that well merits this fresh, engaging translation, which marks its author’s 700th birthday.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-06930-3
Page Count: 1264
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
Haunting and superbly crafted, this is a magical book from a writer of immense talent and intelligence.
The lives of three generations of women in Jamaica intersect as they try to build better lives.
Margot, a 30-year-old desk clerk at a hotel in Jamaica, has fallen into a side business of sex with the white men who visit the island looking for poor women to exploit. This, of course, is not the life Margot wants. She only does it to support her younger sister, Thandi, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who's destined to be successful and “make everything better” for the family. Thandi, however, is more interested in being thought beautiful and the type of success that goes along with that, spending her extra money on skin-lightening creams to turn her dark skin whiter. Thandi's and Margot’s tales intertwine with the story of their abusive mother, Delores, and the rest of their poverty-stricken community, set against the backdrop of wealthy white tourists. Margot finds a temporary refuge from the constant barrage of work and men in her romantic relationship with a local woman named Verdene, but she can't escape the fear of violence that same-sex couples in their society face. And, as past secrets come to a head, the poor black and wealthy white worlds of Jamaica collide. This debut novel from Dennis-Benn is an astute social commentary on the intricacies of race, gender, wealth inequality, colorism, and tourism. But these themes rise organically from the narrative rather than overwhelming it. Here are visceral, profound writing and invigorating characters. Here, too, is the deep and specific sensation of experience. Consider teenage Thandi’s first awareness of being watched by the boy she likes: “a pulse stirs between her legs and she hurries down the path, holding it in like pee."
Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-176-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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