Download or read book What Belongs to You written by Garth Greenwell and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction • A Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction • A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction • A Finalist for the James Taite Black Prize for Fiction • A Finalist the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize • A Finalist for the Green Carnation Prize • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named One of the Best Books of the Year by More Than Fifty Publications, Including: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times (selected by Dwight Garner), GQ, The Washington Post, Esquire, NPR, Slate, Vulture, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian (London), The Telegraph (London), The Evening Standard (London), The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Millions, BuzzFeed, The New Republic (Best Debuts of the Year), Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly (One of the Ten Best Books of the Year) "Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You appeared in early 2016, and is a short first novel by a young writer; still, it was not easily surpassed by anything that appeared later in the year....It is not just first novelists who will be envious of Greenwell's achievement."—James Wood, The New Yorker On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he’s forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko’s own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and want. What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love. A conversation between Garth Greenwell and Hanya Yanagihara is included inside the e-book edition.

Download or read book Gomer s Song written by Kwame Dawes and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2007-09-01 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gomer, an Old Testament harlot, was the non-conformist wife of the prophet Hosea. In Dawes' contemporary reinterpretation of this Bible story, he presents a beautiful and sometimes erotic exploration of the cost of arriving at freedom with an uneasy grace. Dawes examines the insidious qualities of power, the confining nature of gender roles and the limits of protest. Through Gomer's journey, readers are asked to consider how each one of us is able to express our own defiance, as well as to tally the costs of our individuality.

Download or read book City of Bones written by Kwame Dawes and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As if convinced that all divination of the future is somehow a re-visioning of the past, Kwame Dawes reminds us of the clairvoyance of haunting. The lyric poems in City of Bones: A Testament constitute a restless jeremiad for our times, and Dawes’s inimitable voice peoples this collection with multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, groaning, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future. As the twentieth collection in the poet’s hallmarked career, City of Bones reaches a pinnacle, adding another chapter to the grand narrative of invention and discovery cradled in the art of empathy that has defined his prodigious body of work. Dawes’s formal mastery is matched only by the precision of his insights into what is at stake in our lives today. These poems are shot through with music from the drum to reggae to the blues to jazz to gospel, proving that Dawes is the ambassador of words and worlds.

Download or read book Lagos Noir written by Jude Dibia and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A stellar cast of award-winning Nigerian authors . . . a must-read for crime lovers looking for something different.”—Brittle Paper In Akashic Books’s acclaimed series of original noir anthologies, each book comprises all new stories set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Now, West Africa enters the Noir Series arena, meticulously edited by one of Nigeria’s best-known authors. In Lagos Noir, the stories are set in “a city of more than 21 million and an amazing amalgam of wealth, poverty, corruption, humor, bravery, and tragedy. Abani and a dozen other contributors tell stories that are both unique to Lagos and universal in their humanity . . . This entry stands as one of the strongest recent additions to Akashic’s popular noir series” (Publishers Weekly, starred review, pick of the week). The anthology includes stories by Chris Abani, Nnedi Okorafor, E.C. Osondu, Jude Dibia, Chika Unigwe, A. Igoni Barrett, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Adebola Rayo, Onyinye Ihezukwu, Uche Okonkwo, Wale Lawal, ’Pemi Aguda, and Leye Adenle. “The beauty of this book, which contains 13 stories from Nigerian writers, is that it serves as a travelogue, too.”—Bloomberg, “The Darkest Summer Reading List for Those Bright, Beachy Days” “With writers like Igoni Barrett, Leye Adenle, and E.C. Osondu contributing, Lagos Noir offers wildly different perspectives on both the city itself and the state of noir fiction. This book is almost like a world in itself, one that you’ll want to dive back into and get lost in again and again.”—CrimeReads, “One of the 10 Best Crime Anthologies of 2018”

Download or read book The New African Poetry written by Tanure Ojaide and published by Three Continents. This book was released on 2000 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology presents the voices of a new generation of African poets, drawn from across the continent and representing a wide range of themes, styles and ideologies. These contemporary voices have been shaped in the realities of postcolonial Africa from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1990s.

Download or read book The Kitchen Dweller s Testimony written by Ladan Osman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony asks: Whose testimony is valid? Whose testimony is worth recording? Osman’s speakers, who are almost always women, assert and reassert in an attempt to establish authority, often through persistent questioning. Specters of race, displacement, and colonialism are often present in her work, providing momentum for speakers to reach beyond their primary, apparent dimensions and better communicate. The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony is about love and longing, divorce, distilled desire, and all the ways we injure ourselves and one another.

Download or read book Sacrament of Bodies written by Romeo Oriogun and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-03-01 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking collection of poems, Sacrament of Bodies, Romeo Oriogun fearlessly interrogates how a queer man in Nigeria can heal in a society where everything is designed to prevent such restoration. With honesty, precision, tenderness of detail, and a light touch, Oriogun explores grief and how the body finds survival through migration.

Download or read book Giant Steps written by Kevin Young and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 2000-02-16 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Standing at the crossroads of American literature and the current African American renaissance, Giant Steps presents a vibrant and wonderfully diverse collection of young black writing. Through generous selections of award-winning poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by writers born after 1960, this groundbreaking anthology welcomes readers into the future of African American writing. Taking its spirit and title from the John Coltrane composition released in 1960, Giant Steps offers an extraordinary window into post-civil rights literature. From Edwidge Danticat and Colson Whitehead to Rebecca Walker and Hilton Als, these authors are not "emerging" but have already arrived. They are National Book Award finalists and winners of the National Poetry Series and the Pushcart Prize. They have been featured in The New Yorker, Time, and Newsweek as our brightest stars; they have been heard through National Public Radio, Rhino Records, and Oprah's Book Club. Previously unpublished works by Danzy Senna, Philippe Wamba, and Elizabeth Alexander run alongside contemporary classics. They are popular and prophetic, literary and experimental. Together with a useful bibliography of current writing and a discography of influential music from soul to jazz to hip-hop, Giant Steps celebrates the complexities of race while paying tribute to the personal and collective histories that are forging this new generation. The writers found in Giant Steps are not "emerging" but have already arrived. From Best American Poetry and O. Henry Award winners to National Book Award finalists and Oprah's Book Club members, the thirty-five authors selected here are some of the best and the brightest writing today. The book features the full diversity of the African American experience, discussing everything from slavery to sexuality, growing up poor, gay, biracial, or all three. There are stories about the American Revolution, slave insurrections, and the year 1979; there are poems about loss and Sam Cooke; essays about sharecropping and the New South. New and unpublished writing by Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead, and Darieck Scott is collected alongside work by such favorites as Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Powell, Hilton Als, and Randall Keenan. The writers in Giant Steps are at the heart of what's happening in contemporary culture, and this anthology welcomes readers to the future and powerful present of African American writing.The writers found in Giant Steps are not "emerging" but have already arrived. From Best American Poetry and O. Henry Award winners to National Book Award finalists and Oprah's Book Club members, the thirty-five authors selected here are some of the best and the brightest writing today. The book features the full diversity of the African American experience, discussing everything from slavery to sexuality, growing up poor, gay, biracial, or all three. There are stories about the American Revolution, slave insurrections, and the year 1979; there are poems about loss and Sam Cooke; essays about sharecropping and the New South. New and unpublished writing by Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead, and Darieck Scott is collected alongside work by such favorites as Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Powell, Hilton Als, and Randall Keenan. The writers in Giant Steps are at the heart of what's happening in contemporary culture, and this anthology welcomes readers to the future and powerful present of African American writing.

Download or read book The Careless Seamstress written by Tjawangwa Dema and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dazzling debut announces a not-so-new voice: that of the spoken-word poet Tjawangwa Dema. Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Dema’s collection, The Careless Seamstress, evokes the national and the subjective while reemphasizing that what is personal is always political. The girls and women in these poems are not mere objects; they speak, labor, and gaze back, with difficulty and consequence. The tropes are familiar, but in their animation they question and move in unexpected ways. The female body—as a daughter, wife, worker, cultural mutineer—moves continually across this collection, fetching water, harvesting corn, raising children, sewing, migrating, and spurning designations. Sewing is rendered subversive, the unsayable is weft into speech and those who are perhaps invisible in life reclaim their voice and leave evidence of their selves. As a consequence the body is rarely posed—it bleeds and scars; it ages; it resists and warns. The female gaze and subsequent voices suggest a different value system that grapples with the gendering of both physical and emotional labor, often through what is done, even and especially when this goes unnoticed or unappreciated. A body of work that examines the nature of power and resistance, The Careless Seamstress shows both startling clarity of purpose and capaciousness of theme. Using gender and labor as their point of departure, these poems are indebted to Dema’s relationship to language, intertextuality, and narrative. It is both assured and inquiring, a quietly complex skein that takes advantage of poetry’s capacity for the polyphonic.

Download or read book Exodus written by 'Gbenga Adeoba and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-03-01 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry, 'Gbenga Adeoba's collection Exodus focuses on forms of migration due to the slave trade, war, natural disasters, and economic opportunities. Using the sea as a source of language and metaphor, Adeoba explores themes of memory, transition, and the intersections between the historic and the imagined. With great tenderness and power his poetry of empathy searches for meaning in sharply constructed images, creating scenes of making and unmaking while he investigates experiences of exile and displacement across time and place.

Download or read book Tisa New Generation African Poets written by Chris Abani and published by Akashic Books, Limited. This book was released on 2023-07-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This twelve-piece, limited-edition box set--an African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) project--features the work of eleven new African poets.

Download or read book When No One Is Watching written by Linathi Makanda and published by Odyssey Books. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When No One Is Watching is a compilation of poems about love and the loss thereof, trauma and the dark reflections that come with it. It is a depiction of sides that people don’t readily show, sides of vulnerability, insecurity and tiny amounts of hope. One could say it is the result of shedding light into a world of secrecy, escapism, an alternate reality belonging to an alternate version of an individual. When No One Is Watching is the truth in its purest form.

Download or read book Speak from Here to There written by Kwame Senu Neville Dawes and published by Peepal Tree Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems 93, 100 and 105 first appeared in the Boston Review.

Download or read book Kindred Spirits written by Associate Professor of African American and African Literature Christopher N Okonkwo and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the first book-length comparative study of literary giants Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe"--

Download or read book The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry written by Gerald Moore and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2007-08-30 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Poetry, always foremost of the arts in traditional Africa, has continued to compete for primacy against the newer forms of prose fiction and theatre drama.' This wonderfully comprehensive anthology of African poetry has been expanded to include ninety-nine poets from twenty-seven countries, thirty-one of whom appear for the first time. Equally wide-ranging is the content of the poetry itself: war songs and political protests jostle with poems about human love, African nature and the surprises that life offers; all are represented in these rich and colourful pages.

Download or read book In a Language that You Know written by Len Verwey and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Africa is a complicated, contradictory, and haunted place. Len Verwey captures the trajectory of life in such a place, dealing with childhood, war, marriage, divorce, and death. He explores the challenges posed by place and history, shared identities, deep embeddedness in the continent, and the legacies of violence and exclusion, as well as beauty. Verwey offers poems that speak of uncertainty, ask questions, and challenge simplistic and scapegoating narratives that become so tempting when living in a society undergoing intense social and economic pressure. Dealing less with factual or political explanations of war and more with the compulsion of war, in particular, "maleness" and violence, Verwey pulls the reader into another world, opening eyes to the "crisis of men," the violence against women, children, and the foreign in a country where conflicts are again escalating. In a Language That You Know strives to understand the complexity of one of the most unequal, violent, yet most vibrant societies in the world.

Download or read book When the Rewards Can Be So Great written by Kwame Dawes and published by 1849 Editions. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compilation of selected crafts talks by faculty at the Pacific University MFA program, this book is an exciting introduction to some of the most alert and engaged minds in literary writing in the US across many genres. The collection allows readers to see how the authors think about writing and about teaching writing.