I was a child who was very dissatisfied with the idea that this world, with its rules and routines, is all there is. Sunday school filled me with a fear of hell, and heaven sounded boring, a lot of people wearing white and singing. This forced me into the world of fairy and folktales: spirits, tricksters, masquerades, elves, werecreatures, and merpeople. It was all so exciting and, more than that, comforting. The just were rewarded, and the wicked were punished within the timeframe of the story, not later when they died.
I loved this book because it is a collection of bizarre, weird, surreal, fabulist tales that tripped me up each time I thought I knew where it was going. The twists! The turns! The things that had no business existing in anyone's mind, let alone in print. Not one dud in this collection of fourteen stories.
Also, I learnt that I could applaud while puking up my lunch. That was fun.
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE LEONARD PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE
A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home.
In “Who Will Greet You at Home,” a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out…
Smutty ghost sex. I had no business reading this book at nine or whatever, but I had an appetite and the aptitude, and my parents were either too trusting or indifferent because SMUTTY GHOST SEX.
I can't remember much else about it, nor can I get a copy, but for nine-year-old me, it was forbidden and titillating.
I grew up reading fairy tales from other lands and taking our own oral stories back home for granted. At the very least, our stories belonged to dark, scary places.
This book changed all that. It was magical! It showed me new Igbo mythology and made my culture appealing and heroic. What's not to love?
I haven't read it in twenty years, having been introduced to Tutuola's work as part of my undergrad degree. It's a book full of ghosts and the sort of mind that perceives and interacts with them. It basically epitomises the saying, 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,' but is the palm-wine drinkard a fool, brave, desperate, or just very, very drunk when he wanders off on his quest through the spirit world? Or is he all of the above?
This classic novel tells the phantasmagorical story of an alcoholic man and his search for his dead palm-wine tapster. As he travels through the land of the dead, he encounters a host of supernatural and often terrifying beings - among them the complete gentleman who returns his body parts to their owners and the insatiable hungry-creature. Mixing Yoruba folktales with what T. S. Eliot described as a 'creepy crawly imagination', The Palm-Wine Drinkard is regarded as the seminal work of African literature.
'Brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching.' Dylan Thomas, Observer
'Tutuola's art conceals - or rather clothes - his purpose,…
My default stance in life is ‘Meh,’ which infuriates my children, but it's pretty hard to get a rise out of me because I've seen some shit.
Nigeria is such a dysfunctional country full of laughter, sunshine, secrets, and puppeteers; it made everything in this book seem feasible. Like, if you stretch my country out like taffy we'd get to a mad stage that everyone would still shrug off and accept.
Rosewater is the start of an award-winning trilogy set in Nigeria, by one of science fiction's most engaging voices.
*Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, winner *Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel, winner
Rosewater is a town on the edge. A community formed around the edges of a mysterious alien biodome, its residents comprise the hopeful, the hungry, and the helpless -- people eager for a glimpse inside the dome or a taste of its rumored healing powers.
Kaaro is a government agent with a criminal past. He has seen inside the biodome, and doesn't care…
Treasure and her mother lost everything when Treasure's daddy died. Haggling for scraps in the market, Treasure meets a spirit who promises to bring her father back - but she has to complete a monstrous task for him first.
Ozoemena has an itch in the middle of her back that can't be scratched. An itch that tells of her great and terrible destiny, passed down through generations, to defend her people by becoming a leopard. Her father impressed upon her what an honour this was before he vanished, but it's one she couldn't want less.
But as the two girls reckon with their burgeoning wildness and the legacy of their fathers' decisions, Ozoemena's fellow students at her new boarding school start to vanish. Treasure and Ozoemena will face frightening choices as they are drawn into battle with sinister forces - and it's a fight they can't both survive.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
