TOBI'S DESK

On September 23, 2020, Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best sci-fi novel of the year. Serpell is set to receive £2020 for her marvelous work of science fiction, but shortly after her win, she announced on Twitter that she will be donating the prize money. I won the @ClarkeAward […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/30po4m5

Aerial view of the Munich Residenz after bombings, 1945. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Wolfgang Koeppen’s novel Pigeons on the Grass , first published in 1951 as Tauben im Gras , is among the earliest, grandest, and most poetically satisfying reckonings in fiction with the postwar state of the world. What have we done to ourselves? What may we hope for? Is life from now on going to be different? Is it even going to be possible? These are the unasked and unanswerable questions that hover around this great novel composed in bite-size chunks, a cross section of a damaged society presented—natch!—in cutup. I once described it as a “Modernist jigsaw in 110 pieces,” but it is as compulsively readable as Dickens or Elmore Leonard. The form catches the eye, but the content is no slouch either. It must be one of the shortest of the universal books, the ones of which you think, If it isn’t in here, it doesn’t exist. The setting is Munich, a place to which Koeppen had first come towar...

Ohio University Press has announced that it will publish a new edition of Eghosa Imasuen’s second novel, Fine Boys, in its Modern African Writers series. Fine Boys was originally published in 2012 by Kachifo Limited. The novel follows a band of friends in a Nigerian University as they navigate a predatory world run by cultish […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2Gps6DC

The twelfth episode of Professor Ato Quayson’s vlog Critic.Reading.Writing is up! Quayson reads from Frantz Fanon’s essay in Black Skin, White Masks, “The Fact of Blackness.” In this essay, Fanon paints an unrelenting portrait of the symbolic dismemberment of his own body under the colonial gaze. Frantz Fanon is a writer whose works can be […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3jj9bcr

What responsibility might a novelist have to use their gift to directly engage political debate? Shirley Hazzard’s authorized biographer examines her life for one potential model. For more, read an unpublished story by Shirley Hazzard in our Fall issue .  SHIRLEY HAZZARD. PHOTO: © NANCY CRAMPTON. In 1990, Shirley Hazzard published Countenance of Truth : it was not the long-awaited novel, successor to her 1980 masterpiece The Transit of Venus , but a dry monograph, in which she revealed in excoriating detail the mendacity of the United Nations and its former head, Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. She chose for its title a phrase from one of the lesser works of the poet John Milton, whom she paraphrased as lamenting the need to set aside poetry to address the urgent evils of his day; in his case, corruption in the clergy. “I have a work that I love as a poet—as if I would turn away from that bright countenance of truth to mix up with antipathetic matters of this kind if I didn’t ...

The last time I watched the stars, I was sheathed in the silence of Joshua Tree, California, that southern desert whose titular trees raised their spiny tentacles to the sky. It was a moonscape, beguilingly strange, the Joshuas huge as gentle aliens. This was in July. I’d left—fled—my home in San Francisco for the same reason generations of restless Californians have made pilgrimage to the desert: escape, disconnection from daily life. All around were lone tents and isolated houses, meditators and sound bathers and people floating up to the sky as acid dissolved under their tongues. As a debut author with a book younger than California’s shelter-in-place orders, I’d spent the past few months rubbed raw by attention, uncannily watched. I looked up and thought the usual stargaze thoughts: how large the universe, how small our worldly concerns. I thought about extraterrestrial sightings in Joshua Tree and the annual “Woodstock of UFOs” conference. I thought, as I often do, of alien life—...

Our conversation happens on Zoom after weeks of negotiating through time zones and continents as scheduling has become an improvisational art. We speak between Princeton and Johannesburg. In spite of living at a busy and noisy intersection—my background is loud, kids screaming their freedom after months of confinement, taxi hooters in Yeoville’s busy thoroughfare add […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3jhVkmC

Brighten your day with this video of Chimamanda Adichie showering her 4-year old daughter with Igbo praise names. She said in the Instagram post that she did in honor her father who passed away earlier in the year. And one day I will tell her that my hailing her, this love-drenched litany of affirmation, is […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3kZWK5z

The AfroSF series of anthologies has provided readers with their fix of African speculative and science fiction since its initial publication in 2012. Each of the three volumes, and the upcoming fourth, have been edited by Zimbabwean writer Ivor Hartmann. Hartmann both founded and continues to head the series. The continued success of the series runs […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2GkyUm4

Nigerian author and photographer Teju Cole is one of the jurors for the 2020 Glenn Gould Prize. Cole is joined on the panel by a distinguished array of artists that includes Neil Gaiman, Hillary Hahn, Dr. Surojeet Chatterji and chaired by Grammy Award-winning composer and film director Laurie Anderson. First awarded in 1987, the Glenn […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2EOE6yi

Nigerian author and photographer Teju Cole is one of the jurors for the 2020 Glenn Gould Prize. Cole is joined on the panel by a distinguished array of artists that includes Neil Gaiman, Hillary Hahn, Dr. Surojeet Chatterji and chaired by Grammy Award-winning composer and film director Laurie Anderson. First awarded in 1987, the Glenn […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2EOE6yi

  This is one of my favorite book titles ever for the journey it evokes, the emergence in intimates. It makes me think of how powerful remembering is and how memory is a form of resistance, healing and comfort. In Petina Gappah’s recent novel Out of Darkness, Shinning Light, Halima is the cook in David […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2SaEU3r

Every week, the editors of  The Paris Review  lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by  signing up for the Redux newsletter . Ali Smith, with Leo, in Cambridge, 2003. This week at The Paris Review , autumn has arrived. Read on for Ali Smith’s Art of Fiction interview , Robert Walser’s work of fiction “ From the Essays of Fritz Kocher ,” and Evie Shockley’s poem “ ex patria .” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not  subscribe  to  The Paris Review ? Or, to celebrate the students and teachers in your life, why not gift our  special subscription deal  featuring a copy of  Writers at Work around the World  for 50% off? And for as long as we’re flattening the curve,  The Paris Review  will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring ...

In a new documentary for the BBC, Nigerian-British historian and filmmaker David Olusoga looks into the steady rise of African literature and it’s continuing relevance on the world stage. Titled ‘Africa Turns the Page: The Novels That Shaped a Continent’,  the 59-minutes documentary is an overall take on African literature, with a special focus on […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3jdk935

Sensuous Knowledge Masterclass with Minna Salami Date: Tuesday 20 October Time: 17:00 – 19:00 (BST) Location: Zoom Tickets: £35 / £17 (concession tickets for Senior 60+, Student, Under 18 and Unemployed) Drawing from Africa-centric and Black feminist thought, Minna Salami presents a new prism for how to engage with the world through her book Sensuous Knowledge : A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone . By weaving intellectual, mythological and artistic traditions, Minna offers accessible and cleverly crafted essays shedding new insight into knowledge production, liberation, decolonization, Black identity, womanhood and sisterhood, power and beauty. Bernardine Evaristo, winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, describes Sensuous Knowledge as ‘intellectual soul food’.  In this one-off masterclass, Minna will share her expertise and multidisciplinary approach to non-fiction writing. Over the two-hour session, participants will learn about different research methodologies and how to...

Best-selling author of Children of Blood and Bones Tomi Adeyemi has been named on TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020, alongside such names as Anthony Fauci, who led the White House Coronavirus Task Force; Academy-Award winning director of Parasite Bong Joon Ho and American artiste Meg the Stallion. Adeyemi shared the news on Twitter: […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2EHJ4wB

Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo is set to deliver the annual New Statesman/ Goldsmith Prize lecture ahead of the 2020 Goldsmith Prize shortlist announcement. The annual lecture series customarily invites a leading author to “offer personal manifestos on why the novel matters.” The event is expected to last an hour and half, with the shortlist […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/30dxGAk

In March,  The Paris Review  launched  The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of   the magazine , quarantine-appropriate writing on the  Daily , resources from our peer organizations,  and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter  here , and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “In the before times, we’d celebrate the arrival of the new issue with a party at the office. I’d greet attendees by shouting from atop the pool table (barefoot to protect the felt), and I’d invite a contributor up to share the shortest of readings before the party got back underway. This past week, we gathered online instead of on Twenty-Seventh Street, and I (still barefoot) welcomed readers from my Alphabet City living room. Sure, I missed the mingling, the hugs and hellos, but at the same time I was grateful for the extra space and attention our new format offered, for both our writers and our read...

Africa Writes have teamed up with Myriad Editions to bring you a moving excerpt from the newly published paperback edition of Margaret Busby’s New Daughters of Africa . This excerpt is written by author and essayist Zadie Smith. Zadie Smith wrote the following speech when accepting The City College of New York’s Langston Hughes Medal (in 2017) which has been published for the first time in New Daughters of Africa . We hope you enjoy this treat and grab a copy of the anthology for your library. If you’d like a 10% discount, head over to Myriad Editions’ website and use the code ‘ AW10 ‘ to claim it! Note that this code is only valid until 30 September. Tell us what you think about this excerpt on Twitter ,  Facebook  and  Instagram . *** Zadie Smith Born in London to an English father and Jamaican mother (Yvonne Bailey-Smith), she published her first novel, White Teeth , aged 24 in the year 2000. The book went on to win a number of awards and prizes, including...

Our column  Feminize Your Canon  explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors.  Alice Dunbar-Nelson In April 1895, the up-and-coming poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom Frederick Douglass had dubbed “the most promising young colored man in America,” saw a poem by a young writer, Alice Ruth Moore, accompanied by a photograph in which she appeared stylish and beautiful. He wrote to her immediately at her home on Palmyra Street in New Orleans, expressing his admiration, and they began an intense epistolary courtship that lasted two years. Six months in, Paul was declaring. “I love you and have loved you since the first time I saw your picture.” He called Alice “the sudden realization of an ideal!” She combined beauty with literary talent and the feminine accomplishments appropriate to an upper-class young woman of the day: “Do you recite? Do you sing? Don’t you dance divinely?” They modeled themselves self-consciously after Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Brown...

Modjaji Books, based in Cape Town, South Africa, is a highly regarded independent press with the very specific mission to amplify the voices of women from and currently living in Southern Africa. Founded by writer Colleen Higgs in 2007, they publish titles, often award-winning, across a range of genres—”from poetry and short stories to novels […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2EDVyW2

Zambian-American novelist Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift has won the 2020 Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best sci-fi novel of the year. Serpell will receive a cash prize of £2020, as well as an award plaque. Serpell’s win is historic, at least, for us in the African literary side of things. Her win makes […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/345IWj3

A butler, Amoda said to me, is a person who brings things to table. As if I did not know such a thing. I could tell him all about men who bring food to table, didn’t we have thousands of those, eunuchs and butlers and all the rest, at the Liwali’s house, and at the qadi‘s […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/33Xzgas

  “Close your eyes and feel it…the sun on your skin. Feel the warmth on your face, the magic flowing through your veins. Life.” Eve, The Witch of Sun *** Behind the counter of the shop on 71 Adelabu Street, behind the veil that dissuades mortal eyes, the Witches of Auchi have their true home. […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2HquJWj

Announcing the second session of #WeTurnToBooks:The Decade Project edition — an Instagram Live chat between Ozoz Sokoh and Petina Gappah! This time round, we’re thrilled to have Ozoz Sokoh take over our Instagram Live to chat with Petina Gappah about food and fiction. Specifically, about Halima, a cook who is one of the narrators of […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2FUk468

Hey Brittle Paper readers! We’re continuing with our 10-year anniversary celebration giveaways. Up for grabs this weekend is a bundle of e-books comprising all the titles published by Ankara Press, the romance imprint of Cassava Republic Press. If you’re a fan of fast-paced romance novels featuring sassy, career-women heroines, this giveaway’s for you! The titles, along with […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3j3stSQ

Evan Rachel Wood as Old Dolio Dyne in Miranda July’s Kajillionaire . Photo courtesy of Focus Features. In California, you’re always waiting for the Big One. This shaky ground serves as the foundation for Miranda July’s latest film, Kajillionaire , in which the Big One could be either an earthquake or a windfall for an oddball family of three who get by pulling scams and living in the leaky office of a bubble factory. But that’s how they like it, the patriarch claims, saying: “Everybody wants to be a Kajillionaire. I prefer to just skim.” His twenty-six-year-old daughter, Old Dolio, has never known anything but this perpetual absence of money, comfort, and so-called “tender feeling.” Along comes Melanie, who tries to show Old Dolio a world beyond her parents. Small earthquakes anticipate Old Dolio’s reckoning, interrupting moments of potential intimacy. But little tendernesses urge her to crawl out from the bubble factory basement or the gas station bathroom stall. Even the simplest ...