Download or read book Reading Chinua Achebe written by Simon Gikandi and published by James Currey. This book was released on 1991 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysis of the writings of Chinua Achebe aimed at students of literature. Simon Gikandi has set out to reveal '...the very nature of [Achebe's] creativity, its prodigious complexity and richness...its paradoxes and ambiguities. This is scholarship of real stature and supersedes all other studies of Achebe's writing. It comes at a good time. Achebe's literary reputation is equal to that of any living author and a substantial critical canon has been established. - G.D. Killam, Professor of English, University of Guelph Kenya: EAEP

Download or read book Reading Chinua Achebe written by Simon Gikandi and published by Heinemann International Incorporated. This book was released on 1991 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simon Gikandi has set out to reveal the very nature of Achebe's creativity, its prodigious complexity and richness, its paradoxes and ambiguities.

Download or read book Reading Chinua Achebe written by Simon Gikandi and published by James Currey Publishers. This book was released on 1991 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysis of the writings of Chinua Achebe aimed at students of literature. Simon Gikandi has set out to reveal '...the very nature of [Achebe's] creativity, its prodigious complexity and richness...its paradoxes and ambiguities. This is scholarship of real stature and supersedes all other studies of Achebe's writing. It comes at a good time. Achebe's literary reputation is equal to that of any living author and a substantial critical canon has been established. - G.D. Killam, Professor of English, University of Guelph Kenya: EAEP

Download or read book Things Fall Apart written by Chinua Achebe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

Download or read book Chike and the River written by Chinua Achebe and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After an 11-year-old Nigerian boy leaves his small village to live with his uncle in the city, he is exposed to a range of new experiences and becomes fascinated with crossing the Niger River on a ferry boat.

Download or read book There Was a Country written by Chinua Achebe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-10-11 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart—a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil war For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.

Download or read book Girls at War written by Chinua Achebe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-02-22 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve stories by the internationally renowned novelist which recreate with energy and authenticity the major social and political issues that confront contemporary Africans on a daily basis.

Download or read book No Longer at Ease written by Chinua Achebe and published by Heinemann. This book was released on 1987 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Obi Okenkwo, a Nigerian country boy, is determined to make it in the city. Educated in England, he has new, refined tastes which eventually conflict with his good resolutions and lead to his downfall.

Download or read book Home and Exile written by Chinua Achebe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-07-27 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinua Achebe is Africa's most prominent writer, the author of Things Fall Apart, the best known--and best selling--novel ever to come out of Africa. His fiction and poetry burn with a passionate commitment to political justice, bringing to life not only Africa's troubled encounters with Europe but also the dark side of contemporary African political life. Now, in Home and Exile, Achebe reveals the man behind his powerful work. Here is an extended exploration of the European impact on African culture, viewed through the most vivid experience available to the author--his own life. It is an extended snapshot of a major writer's childhood, illuminating his roots as an artist. Achebe discusses his English education and the relationship between colonial writers and the European literary tradition. He argues that if colonial writers try to imitate and, indeed, go one better than the Empire, they run the danger of undervaluing their homeland and their own people. Achebe contends that to redress the inequities of global oppression, writers must focus on where they come from, insisting that their value systems are as legitimate as any other. Stories are a real source of power in the world, he concludes, and to imitate the literature of another culture is to give that power away. Home and Exile is a moving account of an exceptional life. Achebe reveals the inner workings of the human conscience through the predicament of Africa and his own intellectual life. It is a story of the triumph of mind, told in the words of one of this century's most gifted writers.

Download or read book A Man of the People written by Chinua Achebe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the renowned author of The African Trilogy, a political satire about an unnamed African country navigating a path between violence and corruption As Minister for Culture, former school teacher M. A. Nanga is a man of the people, as cynical as he is charming, and a roguish opportunist. When Odili, an idealistic young teacher, visits his former instructor at the ministry, the division between them is vast. But in the eat-and-let-eat atmosphere, Odili's idealism soon collides with his lusts—and the two men's personal and political tauntings threaten to send their country into chaos. When Odili launches a vicious campaign against his former mentor for the same seat in an election, their mutual animosity drives the country to revolution. Published, prophetically, just days before Nigeria's first attempted coup in 1966, A Man of the People is an essential part of Achebe’s body of work.

Download or read book Chinua Achebe s Things Fall Apart written by David Whittaker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-08 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an insight into African culture that had not been portrayed before, Things Fall Apart is the tragic story of an individual set in the wider context of colonialism, as well as a powerful and complex political statement of cross-cultural encounters. This guide offers an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Things Fall Apart, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present and the critical material that surrounds it.

Download or read book Chinua Achebe written by Catherine Lynette Innes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-03-26 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Things fall Apart", is compared with Joyce Cary's "Mister Johnson". Achebe's novel is seen as a more realistic portrayal of the society and culture of indigenous people of Nigeria.

Download or read book Conversations with Chinua Achebe written by Chinua Achebe and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1997 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinua Achebe's books are being read throughout the English-speaking world. They have been translated into more than fifty languages. His publishers estimate that more than eight million copies of his first novel Things Fall Apart (1958) have been sold. As a consequence, he is the best known and most widely studied African author. His distinguished books of fiction and nonfiction include No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, Morning Yet on Creation Day, Christmas in Biafra, and others. Achebe often has been called the inventor of the African novel. Although he modestly denies the title, it is true that modern African literature would not have flowered so rapidly and spectacularly had he not led the way by telling Africa's story from a distinctively African point of view. Many other Africans have been inspired to write novels by his example. The interviews collected here span more than thirty years of Achebe's writing career. The earliest was recorded in 1962, the latest in 1995. Together they offer a representative sample of what he has said to interviewers for newspapers, journals, and books in many different countries. Through his own statements we can see Achebe as a man of letters, a man of ideas, a man of words. As these interviews show, Achebe is an impressive speaker and gifted conversationalist who expresses his ideas in language that is simple yet pungent, moderate yet peppered with colorful images and illustrations. It is this talent for deep and meaningful communication, this intimate way with words, that makes his interviews a delight to read. He has a facility for penetrating to the essence of a question and framing a response that addresses the concerns of the questioner and sometimes goes beyond those concerns to matters of general interest. "People," he says, "are expecting from literature serious comment on their lives. They are not expecting frivolity. They are expecting literature to say something important to help them in their struggle with life. This is what literature, what art, is supposed to do: to give us a second handle on reality so that when it becomes necessary to do so, we can turn to art and find a way out. So it is a serious matter."

Download or read book This Is Pleasure written by Mary Gaitskill and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident. The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable. Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

Download or read book The Life and Times of Chinua Achebe written by Kalu Ogbaa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Life and Times of Chinua Achebe introduces readers to the life, literary works, and times of arguably the most widely-read African novelist of recent times, an icon, both in continental Africa and abroad. The book weaves together the story of Chinua Achebe, a young Igboman whose novel Things Fall Apart opened the eyes of the world to a more realistic image of Africa that was warped by generations of European travelers, colonists, and writers. Whilst continuing to write further influential novels and essays, Achebe also taught other African writers to use their skills to help their national leaders to fight for their freedoms in the post-colonial era, as internal warfare compounded the damage caused by European powers during the colonial era. In this book Kalu Ogbaa, an esteemed expert on Achebe and his works, draws on extensive research and personal interviews with the great man and his colleagues and friends, to tell the story of Achebe and his work. This intimate and powerful new biography will be essential reading for students and scholars of Chinua Achebe, and to anyone with an interest in the literature and post-colonial politics of Africa.

Download or read book Sweet Medicine written by Panashe Chigumazi and published by Blackbird Books. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sweet Medicine takes place in Harare at the height of Zimbabwe's economic woes in 2008. Tsitsi, a young woman, raised by her strict, devout Catholic mother, believes that hard work, prayer and an education will ensure a prosperous and happy future. She does well at her mission boarding school, and goes on to obtain a scholarship to attend university, but the change in the economic situation in Zimbabwe destroys the old system where hard work and a degree guaranteed a good life. Out of university, Tsitsi finds herself in a position much lower than she had set her sights on, working as a clerk in the office of the local politician, Zvobgo. With a salary that barely provides her a means to survive, she finds herself increasingly compromising her Christian values to negotiate ways to get ahead. Panashe Chigumadzi is a young and upcoming media executive passionate about creating new narratives that work to redefine and reaffirm African identity. She is the founder and editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform which aims to speak to the life of young black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa. She has previously worked as a TV journalist for CNBC Africa, a columnist for Forbes Woman Africa and a contributor to Forbes Africa. She has been invited to speak at a number of local and international events. In 2013 she became a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Shapers community, a network of young people who strive to make an impact in their communities. Panashe is a 2015 Ruth First Fellow at Wits University.

Download or read book The Civilized World written by Susi Wyss and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A glorious literary debut set in Africa about five unforgettable women—two of them haunted by a shared tragedy—whose lives intersect in unexpected and sometimes explosive ways When Adjoa leaves Ghana to find work in the Ivory Coast, she hopes that one day she'll return home to open a beauty parlor. Her dream comes true, though not before she suffers a devastating loss—one that will haunt her for years, and one that also deeply affects Janice, an American aid worker who no longer feels she has a place to call home. But the bustling Precious Brother Salon is not just the "cleanest, friendliest, and most welcoming in the city." It's also where locals catch up on their gossip; where Comfort, an imperious busybody, can complain about her American daughter-in-law, Linda; and where Adjoa can get a fresh start on life—or so she thinks, until Janice moves to Ghana and unexpectedly stumbles upon the salon. At once deeply moving and utterly charming, The Civilized World follows five women as they face meddling mothers-in-law, unfaithful partners, and the lingering aftereffects of racism, only to learn that their cultural differences are outweighed by their common bond as women. With vibrant prose, Susi Wyss explores what it means to need forgiveness—and what it means to forgive.