Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa

Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa
Author: Macsmart Ojiludu
Publisher: Catalyst Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9781946395573

These stories by new and emerging writers from the continent of Africa all tackle the theme of 'Disruption' in ingenious ways and represent a range of genres, from Innocent Ilo's imaginative exploration of a post-apocalyptic African village, to Victor Forna's stylistic take on the destruction of humanity. Masiyaleti Mbewe's brutal tale of Apartheid and climate change through the eyes of a time-traveling cyborg sits alongside Genna Gardini's diverting allegory of companionship and an escaped exotic pet. The 2021 anthology features stories from across the continent, from Libya to Sierra Leone to Zambia to South Africa, and also includes a translated story, 'Armando's Virtuous Crime' by Najwa Bin Shatwan, translated from Arabic into English by Sawad Hussain.

Feast, Famine and Potluck

Feast, Famine and Potluck
Author: Karen Jennings
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2014-06-14
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0620588861

A dazzling collection from across the African continent and diaspora here SHORT STORY DAY AFRICA has assembled the best nineteen stories from their 2013 competition. Food is at the centre of stories from authors emerging and established, blending the secular, the supernatural, the old and the new in a spectacular celebration of short fiction. Civil wars, evictions, vacations, feasts and romances the stories we bring to our tables that bring us together and tear us apart.

The Short Story in South Africa

The Short Story in South Africa
Author: Rebecca Fasselt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2022-03-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000562409

This book considers the key critical interventions on short story writing in South Africa written in English since the year 2000. The short story genre, whilst often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. In recent years, the short story has undergone a significant renaissance, with new collections and young writers making a significant impact on the contemporary literary scene, and subgenres such as speculative fiction, erotic fiction, flash fiction and queer fiction expanding rapidly in popularity. This book examines the role of the short story genre in reflecting or championing new developments in South African writing and the ways in which traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa have been reimagined in the present. Drawing together a range of critical interventions, including scholarly articles, interviews and personal reflective pieces, the volume traces some of the aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities in the genre and sheds new light on questions of literary form. Finally, the book considers the place of the short story in twenty-first century writing and interrogates the ways in which the short story form may contribute to, or recast ideas of, the post-apartheid or post-transitional. The perfect guide to contemporary short story writing in South Africa, this book will be essential reading for researchers of African literature.

Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1994-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385474547

“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

All Our Names

All Our Names
Author: Dinaw Mengestu
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2014-03-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385349998

From acclaimed author Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 award, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant, comes an unforgettable love story about a searing affair between an American woman and an African man in 1970s America and an unflinching novel about the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories. All Our Names is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university campus into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, the friends are driven apart—one into the deepest peril, as the movement gathers inexorable force, and the other into the safety of exile in the American Midwest. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into small-town life. Yet this idyll is inescapably darkened by the secrets of his past: the acts he committed and the work he left unfinished. Most of all, he is haunted by the beloved friend he left behind, the charismatic leader who first guided him to revolution and then sacrificed everything to ensure his freedom. Elegiac, blazing with insights about the physical and emotional geographies that circumscribe our lives, All Our Names is a marvel of vision and tonal command. Writing within the grand tradition of Naipul, Greene, and Achebe, Mengestu gives us a political novel that is also a transfixing portrait of love and grace, of self-determination and the names we are given and the names we earn. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Writing South Africa

Writing South Africa
Author: Derek Attridge
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1998-01-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521597685

During the final years of the apartheid era and the subsequent transition to democracy, South African literary writing caught the world's attention as never before. Writers responded to the changing political situation and its daily impact on the country's inhabitants with works that recorded or satirised state-enforced racism, explored the possibilities of resistance and rebuilding, and creatively addressed the vexed question of literature's relation to politics and ethics. Writing South Africa offers a window on the literary activity of this extraordinary period that conveys its range (going well beyond a handful of world-renowned names) and its significance for anyone interested in the impact of decolonisation and democratisation on the cultural sphere. It brings together for the first time discussions by some of the most distinguished South African novelists, poets, and dramatists, with those of leading commentators based in South Africa, Britain and North America.

Queer Africa 2: New Stories

Queer Africa 2: New Stories
Author: Makhosazana Xaba
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2017-08-08
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0620924489

In Queer Africa 2: New Stories, the 26 stories by writers from Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Uganda and the USA present exciting and varied narratives on life. There are stories on desire, disruption and dreams; others on longing, lust and love. The stories are representative of the range of human emotions and experiences that abound in the lives of Africans and those of the diaspora, who identify variously along the long and fluid line of the sexuality, gender and sexual orientation spectrum in the African continent. Centred in these stories and in their attendant relationships is humanity. The writers showcase their artistry in storytelling in thought-provoking and delightful ways.

The Scramble for Europe

The Scramble for Europe
Author: Stephen Smith
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 150953458X

From the harrowing situation of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean in rubber dinghies to the crisis on the US-Mexico border, mass migration is one of the most urgent issues facing our societies today. At the same time, viable solutions seem ever more remote, with the increasing polarization of public attitudes and political positions. In this book, Stephen Smith focuses on ‘young Africa’ – 40 per cent of its population are under fifteen – anda dramatic demographic shift. Today, 510 million people live inside EU borders, and 1.25 billion people in Africa. In 2050, 450 million Europeans will face 2.5 billion Africans – five times their number. The demographics are implacable. The scramble for Europe will become as inexorable as the ‘scramble for Africa’ was at the end of the nineteenth century, when 275 million people lived north and only 100 million lived south of the Mediterranean. Then it was all about raw materials and national pride, now it is about young Africans seeking a better life on the Old Continent, the island of prosperity within their reach. If Africa’s migratory patterns follow the historic precedents set by other less developed parts of the world, in thirty years a quarter of Europe’s population will beAfro-Europeans. Addressingthe question of how Europe cancope with an influx of this magnitude, Smith argues for a path between the two extremes of today’s debate. He advocatesmigratory policies of ‘good neighbourhood’ equidistant from guilt-ridden self-denial and nativist egoism. This sobering analysis of the migration challenges we now face will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the great social and political questions of our time.

The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel
Author: F. Abiola Irele
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2009-07-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139827707

Africa's strong tradition of storytelling has long been an expression of an oral narrative culture. African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Naguib Mahfouz, Wole Soyinka and J. M. Coetzee have adapted these older forms to develop and enhance the genre of the novel, in a shift from the oral mode to print. Comprehensive in scope, these new essays cover the fiction in the European languages from North Africa and Africa south of the Sahara, as well as in Arabic. They highlight the themes and styles of the African novel through an examination of the works that have either attained canonical status - an entire chapter is devoted to the work of Chinua Achebe - or can be expected to do so. Including a guide to further reading and a chronology, this is the ideal starting-point for students of African and world literatures.

The Best Short Stories 2023

The Best Short Stories 2023
Author: Lauren Groff
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2023-09-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593470591

The prestigious annual story anthology includes prize-winning stories by Jamil Jan Kochai, David Ryan, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Lisa Taddeo, Ling Ma, Catherine Lacey, and Cristina Rivera Garza. “[A] standout collection . . . . Dazzling performances from some of today’s most exciting writers. . . . This is one of the best fiction anthologies in years.” —Publishers Weekly starred review Continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence, this year's edition contains twenty prizewinning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. Guest editor Lauren Groff has brought her own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and emerging voices and including several stories in translation. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Groff, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction. AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL. THE WINNING STORIES: “Office Hours,” by Ling Ma “Man Mountain,” by Catherine Lacey “Me, Rory and Aurora,” by Jonas Eika, translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg “The Complete,” by Gabriel Smith “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak," by Jamil Jan Kochai “Wisconsin,” by Lisa Taddeo “Ira & the Whale,” by Rachel B. Glaser “The Commander’s Teeth,” by Naomi Shuyama-Gómez “The Mad People of Paris,” Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead “Snake & Submarine,” by Shelby Kinney-Lang “The Mother,” by Jacob M’hango “The Hollow,” by ’Pemi Aguda “Dream Man,” by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Francisca González-Arias “The Locksmith,” by Grey Wolfe LaJoie “After Hours at the Acacia Park Pool,” by Kirstin Valdez Quade “Happy Is a Doing Word,” by Arinze Ifeakandu “Elision,” by David Ryan “Xífù,” by K-Ming Chang “Temporary Housing,” by Kathleen Alcott “The Blackhills,” by Eamon McGuinness