Under the Udala Trees

Under the Udala Trees PDF Author: Chinelo Okparanta
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544003446
Category : Civil war
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Get Book

Book Description
Inspired by her mother's stories of war and Nigeria's folktale traditions, Under the Udala Trees is Chinelo Okparanta's deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly

Under the Udala Trees

Under the Udala Trees PDF Author: Chinelo Okparanta
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544003446
Category : Civil war
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Get Book

Book Description
Inspired by her mother's stories of war and Nigeria's folktale traditions, Under the Udala Trees is Chinelo Okparanta's deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly

Happiness, Like Water

Happiness, Like Water PDF Author: Chinelo Okparanta
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544003454
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book

Book Description
A moving debut story collection centered on Nigerian women, as they build lives out of longing and hope, faith and doubt, the struggle to stay and the mandate to leave, and the burden and strength of love.

Harry Sylvester Bird

Harry Sylvester Bird PDF Author: Chinelo Okparanta
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0358622328
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book

Book Description
From the award-winning author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water comes a brilliant, provocative, up-to-the-minute satirical novel about a young white man’s education and miseducation in contemporary America. Harry Sylvester Bird grows up in Edward, Pennsylvania, with his parents, Wayne and Chevy, whom he greatly dislikes. They’re racist, xenophobic, financially incompetent, and they have quite a few secrets of their own. To Harry, they represent everything wrong with this country. And his small town isn’t any better. He witnesses racial profiling, graffitied swastikas, and White Power signs on his walk home from school. He can’t wait until he’s old enough to leave. When he finally is, he moves straight to New York City, where he feels he can finally live out his true inner self. In the city, he meets and falls in love with Maryam, a young Nigerian woman. But when Maryam begins to pull away, Harry is forced to confront his identity as he never has before—if he can. Brilliant, funny, original, and unflinching, Harry Sylvester Bird is a satire that speaks to all the most pressing tensions and anxieties of our time—and of the history that has shaped us and might continue to do so.

Jam on the Vine

Jam on the Vine PDF Author: LaShonda Katrice Barnett
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802191576
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book

Book Description
In this “captivating saga” of the post-Reconstruction era, a black female journalist blazes her own trail—“unforgettable; gripping; an instant classic” (Elle). Ivoe Williams, the precocious daughter of a Muslim cook and a metalsmith from central-east Texas, discovers a lifelong obsession with journalism when she steals a newspaper from her mother’s white employer. Living in the segregated quarter of Little Tunis, Ivoe immerses herself in the printed word until she earns a scholarship to the prestigious Willetson Collegiate in Austin. Finally fleeing the Jim Crow South to settle in Kansas City, Ivoe and Ona, her former teacher and present lover, start the first female-run African American newspaper, Jam On the Vine. In the throes of the Red Summer—the 1919 outbreak of lynchings and race riots across the Midwest—Ivoe risks her freedom and her life to call attention to the atrocities of the American prison system. Inspired by the legacy of trailblazing black women like Ida B. Wells and Charlotta Bass, LaShonda Katrice Barnett’s Jam On the Vine is both an epic vision of the hardships that defined an era and “an ode to activism, writ[ten] with a scholar’s eye and a poet’s soul” (Tayari Jones, O The Oprah Magazine).

Speak No Evil

Speak No Evil PDF Author: Uzodinma Iweala
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062199099
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book

Book Description
Winner of the Gold Nautilus Award for Fiction | A Lambda Literary Award Finalist | A Barbara Gittings Literature Award Finalist |One of Bustle’s and Paste’s Most Anticipated Fiction Books of the Year “Speak No Evil is the rarest of novels: the one you start out just to read, then end up sinking so deeply into it, seeing yourself so clearly in it, that the novel starts reading you.” — Marlon James, Booker Award-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings In the tradition of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Speak No Evil explores what it means to be different in a fundamentally conformist society and how that difference plays out in our inner and outer struggles. It is a novel about the power of words and self-identification, about who gets to speak and who has the power to speak for other people. As heart-wrenching and timely as his breakout debut, Beasts of No Nation, Uzodinma Iweala’s second novel cuts to the core of our humanity and leaves us reeling in its wake. On the surface, Niru leads a charmed life. Raised by two attentive parents in Washington, D.C., he’s a top student and a track star at his prestigious private high school. Bound for Harvard in the fall, his prospects are bright. But Niru has a painful secret: he is queer—an abominable sin to his conservative Nigerian parents. No one knows except Meredith, his best friend, the daughter of prominent Washington insiders—and the one person who seems not to judge him. When his father accidentally discovers Niru is gay, the fallout is brutal and swift. Coping with troubles of her own, however, Meredith finds that she has little left emotionally to offer him. As the two friends struggle to reconcile their desires against the expectations and institutions that seek to define them, they find themselves speeding toward a future more violent and senseless than they can imagine. Neither will escape unscathed.

The Thirty Names of Night

The Thirty Names of Night PDF Author: Zeyn Joukhadar
Publisher: Atria Books
ISBN: 1982121491
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
Winner of the ALA Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award Named Best Book of the Year by Bustle Named Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Millions, Electric Literature, and HuffPost ​The author of the “vivid and urgent…important and timely” (The New York Times Book Review) debut The Map of Salt and Stars returns with this remarkably moving and lyrical novel following three generations of Syrian Americans who are linked by a mysterious species of bird and the truths they carry close to their hearts. Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare. As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along. Featuring Zeyn Joukhadar’s signature “magical and heart-wrenching” (The Christian Science Monitor) storytelling, The Thirty Names of Night is a timely exploration of how we all search for and ultimately embrace who we are.

Frog Music

Frog Music PDF Author: Emma Donoghue
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316324663
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Get Book

Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Room, a young French burlesque dancer living in San Francisco is ready to risk anything in order to solve her friend’s murder—but only if the killer doesn’t get her first. Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny's murderer to justice—if he doesn't track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers, and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women, and damaged children. It's the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts. In thrilling, cinematic style, Frog Music digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue's lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boomtown like no other. "Her greatest achievement yet . . . Emma Donoghue shows more than range with Frog Music—she shows genius." —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life.

Feast, Famine and Potluck

Feast, Famine and Potluck PDF Author: Karen Jennings
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 0620588861
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Ogadinma

Ogadinma PDF Author: Ukamaka Olisakwe
Publisher: Black Spot Books
ISBN: 1911648179
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book

Book Description
Ogadinma Or, Everything Will be All Right is a tale of departure, loss and adaptation; of mothers whose experience at the hands of controlling men leave them with burdens they find too much to bear. After an unwanted pregnancy leaves her exiled from her family in Kano, thwarting her plans to go to university, seventeen-year-old Ogadinma is sent to her aunt's in Lagos. When a whirlwind romance with an older man descends into indignity, she is forced to channel her strength and resourcefulness to escape a fate that appears all but inevitable. A feminist classic in the making, Ukamaka Olisakwe's sophomore novel introduces a heroine for whom it is impossible not to root and announces the author as a gifted chronicler of the patriarchal experience. Illuminates a fascinating time in Nigeria's recent past, as the novel's heroine struggles against the shackles of a Church-dominated patriarchal society amid rising political turmoil · Written by a rising star of Nigeria's vibrant literature scene, a finalist for the 2019 Brittle Paper Award for Creative Nonfiction and established screenwriter · An exquisitely written bildungsroman that will appeal equally to readers of literary fiction and a new adult audience

The Isle of Youth

The Isle of Youth PDF Author: Laura van den Berg
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374177236
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book

Book Description
"Beautiful, strange, and compulsively readable stories from an already-celebrated young writer"--