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Song for Night
by Chris AbaniPart Inferno, part Paradise Lost, and part Sunjiata epic, Song for Night is the story of a West African boy soldier’s lyrical, terrifying, yet beautiful journey through the nightmare landscape of a brutal war in search of his lost platoon. The reader is led by the voiceless protagonist who, as part of a land mine-clearing platoon, had his vocal chords cut, a move to keep these children from screaming when blown up, and thereby distracting the other minesweepers. The book is written in a ghostly voice, with each chapter headed by a line of the unique sign language these children invented. This book is unlike anything else ever written about an African war.
Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieWith effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s.
We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene.
Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.
Winner of the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction
Say You're One of Them
by Uwem AkpanUwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few readers will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.
In the second of his stories published in a New Yorker special fiction issue, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa.
Gun Dealers' Daughter
by Gina ApostolWinner of the PEN/Open Book Award
At university in Manila, young, bookish Soledad Soliman falls in with radical friends, defying her wealthy parents and their society crowd. Drawn in by two romantic young rebels, Sol initiates a conspiracy that quickly spirals out of control. Years later, far from her homeland, Sol reconstructs her fractured memories, writing a confession she hopes will be her salvation. Illuminating the dramatic history of the Marcos-era Philippines, this story of youthful passion is a tour de force.
Tales of the Out & the Gone
by Amiri BarakaComprising short fiction from the early 1970s to the twenty-first century—most of which has never been published—Tales of the Out & the Gone reflects the astounding evolution of America’s most provocative literary anti-hero.
The first section of the book, “War Stories,” offers six stories enmeshed in the vola-tile politics of the 1970s and 1980s. The second section, “Tales of the Out & the Gone,” reveals Amiri Baraka’s increasing literary adventurousness, combining an unpredictable language play with a passion for abstraction and psychological exploration.
Throughout, Baraka’s unique and constantly changing literary style will educate readers on the evolution of one of America’s most accomplished literary masters of the past four decades.
Chord
by Rick BarotThe poems of Chord are without flash or gimmick, and though they accurately reflect our moment, they would have been recognized as superb poetry in any time or place. In this his third book, Rick Barot solidifies and extends his reputation as a meticulous, elegant, musical contemporary American poet.
Flood Song
by Sherwin BitsuiNative traditions scrape against contemporary urban life in Flood Song, an interweaving painterly sequence populated with wrens and reeds, bricks and gasoline. Poet Sherwin Bitsui is at the forefront of a new generation of Native writers who resist being identified solely by race. At the same time, he comes from a traditional indigenous family and Flood Song is filled with allusions to Dine (Navajo) myths, customs, and traditions. Highly imagistic and constantly in motion, his poems draw variously upon medicine song and contemporary language and poetics. “I map a shrinking map,” he writes, and “bite my eyes shut between these songs.” An astonishing, elemental volume.
Inheritance
by Lan Samantha ChangA timeless story of familial devotion undermined by deceit and passion and rebuilt by memory.
In 1931, abandoned after their mother's suicide, the young Junan and her sister, Yinan, make a pact never to leave each other. The two girls are inseparable--until Junan enters into an arranged marriage and finds herself falling in love with her soldier husband. When the Japanese invade China, Junan and her husband are separated. Unable to follow him to the wartime capital, Junan makes the fateful decision to send her sister after him. Inheritance traces the echo of betrayal through generations and explores the elusive nature of trust. Reading group guide included.
The Beautiful and the Damned
by Siddhartha DebIn 2004, after six years in New York, Siddhartha Deb returned to India to look for a job. He discovered that sweeping change had overtaken the country. With the globalization of its economy, the relaxation of trade rules, the growth in technology, and the shrinking down of the state, a new India was being born. Deb realised he had found his job: to explore this vast, complex and bewildering nation and try to make sense of what was underway.
The Beautiful and the Damned is the triumphant outcome. It is a virtuosic work that combines personal narrative, travalogue, reportage, penetrating analysis, and the stories of many individuals across a vast range of geographical and social cicumstances.
Deb talks to the great and good and those in charge, but listens as intently to the worker at the call centre remaking herself from her provincial upbringings and the migrant sweatshop worker trying to make his way in the city. By listening to the stories of the people he meets and works alongside (the author did his time on the phones at a call centre) Deb shows how people caught in the midstream of these changes actually experience them.
Visiting the metropolises, small towns, and villages, as well as both gated suburban communities and camps for displaced peasants, Deb offers a panoramic view of the changes in landscape and urban geography, creating an epic narrative of the people who make up the world's second-most populous (and soon to be the most populous) nation. This is a work of social reportage that presents the reader with the fullest and most enlighteing picture of a diverse, emerging superpower.
Eye of the Fish
by Luis H. FranciaThe first of Luis H. Francia's books of non-fiction to be published in the United States, The Eye of the Fish paints a vivid and detailed portrait of the terror, beauty and insistent humanity of the Philippines of today.
Cross-cutting between Francia's recollections of the Philippines of his youth and accounts of his travels through the archipelago over the past two decades, The Eye of the Fish takes us the length of the nation: from Batanes in the north to the Muslim Jolo and Marawi regions of the south, and from the rugged mountain hideaways of revolutionary freedom fighters to the well-appointed salons of the political and cultural elite. Painters and priests, island shamans and small-town politicians, cultists, feminists and infamous first ladies all make an appearance in this imaginative and idiosyncratic exploration of 'home.'
Through their stories, and through his own memories of estrangement and acceptance in the Philippines and in the U.S., Francia reflects on the hybridity that is simultaneously the burden and the benediction of the Philippines--and of his own mestizo self.
Sky Train
by Ward Mcburney and Jeff GoodesWhat do Northtrop Frye, French dairy cows, and Historic Fort York have in common? They're all part of Ward McBurney's lyric and personal stories from CBC Radio's Fresh Air, which are now available for the first time in print.
Broadcasting live on Saturday mornings, with Jeff Goodes as host, Ward has been performing his own work for over four years. Sky Train collects 35 of his creative non-fiction pieces, in which Isaac Brock, steam trains, dream trains, Fred Astaire, star fortifications, a tai chi master, truss bridges, ghost soldiers, lost loves, found objects, and, not the least, the author's pet turtle, all find a home.
A spirit of companionship and urban curiosity informs these stories, which cherish the marginalia of everyday life, while revealing that the past is always just around the present corner.
West of the Jordan
by Laila HalabyA poignant novel of four Arab women; the first Bluestreak original. This is a brilliant and revelatory first novel by a woman who is both an Arab and an American, who speaks with both voices and understands both worlds. Through the narratives of four cousins at the brink of maturity, Laila Halaby immerses her readers in the lives, friendships, and loves of girls struggling with national, ethnic, and sexual identities.
Mawal is the stable one, living steeped in the security of Palestinian traditions in the West Bank. Hala is torn between two worlds--in love in Jordan, drawn back to the world she has come to love in Arizona. Khadija is terrified by the sexual freedom of her American friends, but scarred, both literally and figuratively, by her father's abusive behavior. Soraya is lost in trying to forge an acceptable life in a foreign yet familiar land, in love with her own uncle, and unable to navigate the fast culture of California youth.
Interweaving their stories, allowing us to see each cousin from multiple points of view, Halaby creates a compelling and entirely original story, a window into the rich and complicated Arab world.
A Map to the Next World
by Joy HarjoIn her fifth book, Joy Harjo, one of our foremost Native American voices, melds memories, dream visions, myths, and stories from America's brutal history into a poetic whole. To view text with line endings as poet intended, please set font size to the smallest size on your device.
Transparency
by Frances HwangWith a deceptively simple yet graceful style, and in the tradition of Lara Vapnyar, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Gish Jen, Frances Hwang captures the thousand minor battles waged in the homes of immigrants--struggles to preserve timehonored traditions or break free of them, to maintain authority or challenge it, and to take advantage of modern excesses without diluting one's ethnic identity.
In "Garden City," a weary Chinese couple, struggling to evict their deadbeat tenant, is forced to face the aftermath of their teenage son's death from cancer. And in "The Old Gentleman," a daughter becomes alienated from her father when he finds love--or what he thinks could be love--in his old age. Frances Hwang is a powerful talent, and TRANSPARENCY not only showcases her myriad gifts, but also announces the arrival of an exciting new voice.
Serious Men
by Manu JosephAyyan Mani will not be constrained by Indian traditions. Despite working at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai as the lowly personal assistant to a brilliant but insufferable astronomer, he dreams of more for himself and his family. Ever wily and ambitious, Ayyan weaves two plots: the first to cheer up his weary, soap-opera-addicted wife by creating outrageous fictions around their ten-year-old son; the other to sabotage the married director by using his boss's seeming romance with the institute's first female--and very attractive--researcher. Meanwhile, as the institute's Brahmins wage a vicious war over theories about alien life, Ayyan sees his deceptions intertwining and setting in motion a series of extraordinary events he cannot stop. Unfailingly funny and irreverent, Serious Men is at once a hilarious portrayal of runaway egos and ambitions and a moving portrait of love and its strange workings. One of 2010's "First Novels to Savor." - Sunday Telegraph
Thelonious Monk
by Robin KelleyThe first full biography of legendary jazz musician Thelonious Monk, written by a brilliant historian, with full access to the family's archives and with dozens of interviews. Now updated with an afterword for Monk’s 2017 centennial.
Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist’s struggle to “make it” without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of “bebop” and establishing Monk as one of America’s greatest composers. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos, Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz’s most original composer.
The Interpreter
by Suki KimSuzy Park is a twenty-nine-year-old Korean American interpreter for the New York City court system. Young, attractive, and achingly alone, she makes a startling and ominous discovery during one court case that forever alters her family's history. Five years prior, her parents--hardworking greengrocers who forfeited personal happiness for their children's gain--were brutally murdered in an apparent robbery of their fruit and vegetable stand. Or so Suzy believed. But the glint of a new lead entices Suzy into the dangerous Korean underworld, and ultimately reveals the mystery of her parents' homicide.
An auspicious debut about the myth of the model Asian citizen, The Interpreter traverses the distance between old worlds and new, poverty and privilege, language and understanding.
Slapboxing with Jesus
by Victor LavalleTwelve original and interconnected stories in the traditions of Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie. Victor D. LaValle's astonishing, violent, and funny debut offers harrowing glimpses at the vulnerable lives of young people who struggle not only to come of age, but to survive the city streets.
In "ancient history," two best friends graduating from high school fight to be the one to leave first for a better world; each one wants to be the fortunate son. In "pops," an African-American boy meets his father, a white cop from Connecticut, and tries not to care. And in "kids on colden street," a boy is momentarily uplifted by the arrival of a younger sister only to discover that brutality leads only to brutality in the natural order of things.
Written with raw candor, grit, and a cautious heart, slapboxing with jesus introduces an exciting and bold new craftsman of contemporary fiction. LaValle's voices echo long after their stories are told.
The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn
by Joseph M. Marshall IIIThe author of The Journey of Crazy Horse presents a legendary battle through the eyes of the Lakota
The saga of Custer's Last Stand has become ingrained in the lore of the American West, and the key players - Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and George Armstrong Custer - have grown to larger-than-life proportions. Now, award-winning historian Joseph M. Marshall presents the revisionist view of the Battle of the Little Bighorn that has been available only in the Lakota oral tradition. Drawing on this rich source of storytelling, Marshall uncovers what really took place at the Little Big Horn and provides fresh insight into the significance of that bloody day.
The Perfect Man
by Naeem MurrWinner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Europe and South Asia
Winner of the 2008 PEN Beyond Margins Award.
Identity, friendship, and a long-hidden crime lie at the heart of Naeem Murr’s captivating novel about five friends growing up in a small 1950s Missouri river town. A contender for the Man Booker Prize, this exhilarating story beautifully evokes the extreme joys, as well as the dark and shameful desires, of childhood.
Young Rajiv Travers hasn’t had much luck fitting in anywhere. Born to an Indian mother who was sold to his English father for £20, Raj is abandoned by his relatives into the reluctant care of Ruth, an American romance writer living in Pisgah, Missouri. While his skin color unsettles most of the townsfolk, who are used to seeing things in black and white, the quick-witted Raj soon finds his place among a group of children his own age.
While the friends remain loyal to one another through the years, it becomes clear that their paths will veer in markedly different directions. But breaking free of the demands of their families and their community, as well as one another, comes at a devastating price: As the chilling secrets of Pisgah’s residents surface, the madness that erupts will cost Raj his closest friend even as it offers him the life he always dreamed of.
Taking us into the intimate life of small-town America, The Perfect Man explores both the power of the secrets that shape us and the capacity of love in all its guises to heal even the most damaged of souls.
A Moonless, Starless Sky
by Alexis Okeowo"Absolutely essential reading, period."---Alexandra Fuller, bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight In the tradition of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, this is a masterful, humane work of literary journalism by New Yorker staff writer Alexis Okeowo--a vivid narrative of Africans who are courageously resisting their continent's wave of fundamentalism.In A Moonless, Starless Sky Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony's LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women's basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram. This debut book by one of America's most acclaimed young journalists illuminates the inner lives of ordinary people doing the extraordinary--lives that are too often hidden, underreported, or ignored by the rest of the world.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
by Helen OyeyemiPlayful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret—Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side. In “Books and Roses” one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers’ fates. In “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” involves a “house of locks,” where doors can be closed only with a key—with surprising, unobservable developments. And in “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think,” a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).
Oyeyemi’s tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation? What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours captivates as it explores the many possible answers.
Dancing in the Dark
by Caryl PhillipsA searing new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragic, little-known life of Bert Williams (1874--1922), the first black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune.
Even as an eleven-year-old child living in Southern California in the late 1800s-his family had recently emigrated from the Bahamas-Bert Williams understood that he had to "learn the role that America had set aside for him. " At the age of twenty-two, after years of struggling for success on the stage, he made the radical decision to do his own "impersonation of a negro": he donned blackface makeup and played the "coon" as a character. Behind this mask, he became a Broadway headliner, starring in the Ziegfeld Follies for eight years and leading his own musical theater company-as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields.
Williams was a man of great intelligence, elegance, and dignity, but the barriers he broke down onstage continued to bear heavily on his personal life, and the contradictions between the man he was and the character he played were increasingly irreconcilable for him. W. C. Fields called him "the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew," and it is this dichotomy at Williams's core that Caryl Phillips illuminates in a richly nuanced, brilliantly written narrative.
The story of a single life, Dancing in the Dark is also a novel about the tragedies of race and identity, and the perils of self-invention, that have long plagued American culture. Powerfully emotional and moving, it is Caryl Phillips's most accomplished novel yet.
Citizen
by Claudia RankineA provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine’s long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.
The Theater of Night
by Alberto RíosNow in paperback, and following the success of his National Book Award nomination, Alberto Ríos’ new book is filled with magic, marvel, and emotional truth. Set along the elusive southern border, his poems trace the lives and loves of an elderly couple through their childhood and courtship to marriage, maturity, old age, and death. Like the best of storytellers, Ríos charms his readers, making us care deeply—even love—these people we read.