The Granta Book of the African Short Story - Edited by Helon Habila

The short story is now in vogue and as Africa goes through a Literary Renaissance, it is expected that the short story will play a major role. Consequently, many awards schemes have been put in place to encourage is genre form. There is the Caine Prize for African Writing and the reformed Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize. It is therefore unavoidable that there is going to be several anthologies of such stories.

The latest to hit the shelves is The Granta Book of African Short Story edited by Helon Habila, author of Oil on Water. Here is a brief review of the book at Africa Book Club. Follow to read the full review.
“But I grope after language to describe the feeling I experience on my evening walks, the light in the air and on the sea. This pleases me: that some things remain beyond my grasp…” thus muses the jogger in Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Promenade about a significant encounter between him, a middle-aged unassuming copy writer, and a young ambitious boxer. The sense of enjoying “things remaining beyond (our) grasp” could be a leitmotiv for many of the stories in the The Granta Book of the African Short Story, encouraging us to read with open eyes, mind and heart. Collected and introduced by award winning Nigerian author, Helon Habila, this new anthology is an outstanding and wide-ranging rich smorgasbord of stories by twenty six writers from nineteen countries all across Africa – stories written in English or translated from French, Portuguese or Arabic.
Click here to read the full review.

Comments

  1. Amy7 December 2011 at 14:18

    Thanks for the link. I must take this off my pile and read it soon!

    ReplyDelete
  2. @parridhlantern7 December 2011 at 20:17

    I have this on my TBR, in fact my wife is reading it at the moment, her favourite is the "The arrangers of Marriage by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

    ReplyDelete
  3. ImageNations8 December 2011 at 07:13

    @Amy, will be looking out for your review.

    ReplyDelete
  4. ImageNations8 December 2011 at 07:14

    @PL, you too. I'll be waiting

    ReplyDelete

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