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This year's reading objective did not include short (single) stories; this excludes short story anthologies. However, when I clicked on the link to this short story, I knew I would read and talk about it.  The Lump in Her Throat  ( Guernica , 2013) by Aba Amissah Asibon is the story of an unnamed but young girl dealing with the effects of her father's death as she goes through her day as any other child with childish tendencies. She, and her suddenly-taciturn standoffish sister, play with their friends in the neighbourhood, as usual, as they share stories (and sometimes the lies) about their lives. Preparations towards the burial of her father is underway; their hair have been shaved, the coffin has been purchased, except that it is of such low quality - unpolished plywood nailed together into the required rectangular box - that she wished she could have purchased the fancy type - polished with golden handles. What makes this story interesting and reminiscent is Aba...

Love on Trial  is the last of the Caine Prize Short I am reviewing. The story was published in the For Honour and other stories anthology by the author. Love on Trial  extracts from a real incident that took place in Malawi. It is about the arrest and sentencing of two Malawian homosexuals to fourteen years in prison; an incident that got the whole world shouting and cutting aid to the country which led to their pardon.  In this story, Charles is a third year law school at the university. He has been stumbled upon by the village drunk, Mr Kanchingwe, when he was having an affair with his lover in a school lavatory. Charles was seen and had to face the villagers whilst his lover bolted not to be seen or heard of in the story again. Mr Kanchigwe has become something of a cult-hero for having stumbled upon the two and so, for a tot of the local gin, Kanchigwe will give some details of what he saw. For, the details more tots have to be provided for him and his growing...

Bombay's Republic  looks at war and its aftermath, especially the psychological effect of a war fought for an unknown cause in an unknown land. Bombay, the main protagonist, has returned from Burma where he had fought at the 'Forgotten' front of the Second World War. But Bombay had not returned quietly and innocently and wholly as he had left. He has come back to his village in Nigeria as a man transformed, with scars all over his body and also with silence. Upon his arrival he has made it a point not to tell any of the news-seeking folks the ordeal he went through in the war and how prejudice against him helped saved his life. He has refused to tell these adult folks how tiger-leeches stuck and sucked out his blood as they waded through rivers; how his comrades were caught in traps that snapped off their heads and carved through their bellies. He has not told anyone any of these including several acts of bravery that earned him three medals of honour including the presti...

Urban Zoning by Billy Kahora is a story that is difficult to place, that is categorise. Not that categorisation is needed to understand a story nor that it is necessary in and of itself. But Kahora has written a story so simple that it becomes complex in a way that is not easily attainable. The story, to me, is different and unique in the sense that it takes one man, tells of his idiosyncracies in an almost surreal manner; or should I say mental, for Billy's protagonist achieves notoriety beyond the realms of the physical. The title itself is proof. In this story, 'Zoning' has nothing to do with apartheid or any form of physical separatism or quarantine; yet, it does. His - that is, Kandle's (the main character's) separatism is from the reality of this harsh world, its troubles and its gloom and doom, through alcohol. Kandle is a man of unique character: though he drinks and gets drunk he is able to control himself from going over the edge; he is a contr...

Constance Myburgh's Hunter Emmanuel is a noir story of sorts. The story was somewhat hard to follow especially due to the technique - or approach - adopted by the author where she mixed dreams and the surreal with reality in a way that doesn't really work. Not that one cannot identify where the dreams end and where reality begins but the parts worked like two immiscible liquids, with one sitting on top of the other. As a story capable of evoking lip-curling grisly imagery, it works; however, it fails on the front of a whodunit. That's how the parts failed to work. Yet, it is possible that the author had nothing of these in her mind. There is no murder per se that requires investigations; but a woman's leg has been severed at the hip level and, fortunately, she has survived and recuperating in the hospital. The severed leg has been tied to the branch of a pine, in a pine forest that is undergoing harvesting. The discoverer of the leg, like in most film-noir or ...

The announcement of the 2012 Caine Prize shortlisted stories promised African fiction that is ' beyond the more stereotypical narratives '. It promised to offer alternatives to the famous, widely known, tales of Africa. If these are the motives, and the two stories I've read are anything to go by, then they are on course. La Salle de Départ by Melissa Tandiwe Myambo is a story about family responsibility, acculturation and home. As most immigrants stories are about. It also fits into that generalised stories where the emigre moves to America, lose his innocence, assimilates the alien culture, comes back home and becomes a caricature of hybrid proportions. Those stories where travel becomes the right of passage into adulthood and where alien characters, sometimes through formal education, at other times through street-education, are adopted and 'mis'-used. In other situations, pathos is played upon and here the story will show how the emigre's incapability...

Twins  by C. E. Morgan is the last of the eight stories featured by The New Yorker in their June 14 & 21, 2010 edition. Marie is a young woman with aspirations: she wants to get a degree and become a teacher; currently, with her diploma, she works as a receptionist for a dentist. The family moved from their polluted Northside home to Knowlton's Corner after a quarrel. And as a racial family with blacks and whites living down south, they are made to deal with some form of racial comments and insinuations now and then. Mike Shaughnessy, the father is Irish and Marie is black. Their sons (the twins) are also colour-divied: Allmon is black and Mickey is white. This somewhat genetic happenstance became curious to the people in the town for both children and adults alike. So that when they go out to play, questions are asked about who their father is and if they are siblings. People, especially from the adults, would dote on Mickey whilst Allmon would stand back; how...

Salvatore's The Kid  is the seventh of the eight stories The New Yorker featured when it provided its best twenty authors under forty years dubbed '20 under 40'. Reviews of the other stories could be read here . A boy of about five years has suddenly appeared at the Hambur g-Fuhlsbüttel Airport, and weeping. Speaking Latvian, the boy is incomprehensible and talks intermittently. Travellers waiting to embark have gathered around him trying to coax him in different languages if he will respond but all prove to no avail. But by some means the boy knows that he is in Germany and that since his mother had warned him that  A German may appear to be a good fellow, but better to hang him Janis, the boy, continued crying. The next section of the story told of Elroy Heflin who had been posted to Latvia and was having an affair with a Latvian lady, Evija. Elroy wanted to marry Evija after she became pregnant but she said she wasn't ready and Elroy was deployed to Afgh...

ZZ Packer's Dayward  is set in the period when the emancipation law has been passed and blacks in America were free to leave their masters and live as freed people. Lazarus and his deaf sister, Mary Celeste, though free, are on the run from the Five Daughters. And Miss Thalia, the owner of Five Daughters had fulfilled her promise of setting Kittredge's dog on them after they had had a head-start because she considered the African race an ungrateful lot of thieves for deserting once emancipation came around. "All I got to say," ... "is that we always fed and clothed you slaves." Fourteen year old Lazarus and nine year old Mary Celeste were on a journey to reunite with their only surviving relative in New Orleans but first they had to survive the journey and the dogs. Using tales told them by their parents like the man who suffocated and killed a dog by wrapping around his some homespun from his shirt and ramming it down the dog's throat, the siblin...

In this short story Shteyngart takes a look at a near-futuristic America where diet, health, technology, credit (or finances) all matter, through the awkward or mismatched relationship between Eunice Parker and Leonard (Lenny) Abramovic. In this near-futuristic world individuals are rapidly evolving (have already become Post Humans different from humans) and the workers at the Post-Human Services have been told to keep a diary, to remember who we were, because at every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day, we transform into different people, utterly unfaithful iterations of our original selves, of the drooling kids in the sandbox.  But not Lenny. Lenny had just returned from Rome to his bio-tech company that deals in selling immortality to High Net Worth Individuals and where he works as Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator (Grade G). In Rome, Lenny had given in to al...

Hitting Budapest is the winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2011. The story is about five young girls, mostly pre-teen, moving from their shanty town of Paradise to the estates of Budapest in search of guavas and anything that matter. As they make their journey towards Budapest they converse as all children do. It is through this that we get to know that Chipo, a girl of ten years, has been impregnated by her grandfather. At Budapest they met a white woman of 33 years who had just come from London, eating ice-cream. They looked longingly at this ice-cream only for her to throw what is left of it into the dustbin and take a picture of them. On their way back they shared their dreams with each other: to travel to America, get big houses and cars. Whereas IMF is a street at Budapest, AU is a street at Paradise, the shanty town. Back at Paradise, the children went to ease themselves in the bush where they saw a woman dangling from a rope - a possible suicide. The c...

 These two stories were taken from The New Yorker June 14 & 21, 2010. What You Do Out Here, When You're Alone by Philipp Meyer Max and Lilli had moved from their modest home in Huntsville to a plush neighbourhood in Oaksville. Unlike Huntsville, they were almost unknown in Oaksville, uninvited to parties and were living under the shadows of the teeming 'filthy' rich. Their new neighbourhood was the place where one could be 'sued for painting [his] mailbox the wrong color, for putting up the wrong fence, for installation of unapproved rooting materials...' But Max was not happy for several reasons. Not because his Porsche business was bad, for he was the 'best Porsche mechanic in Texas, the entire Southwest, if he was hones', in fact business was good and could even do favours for those who could not afford his services. Max was not happy because of Lilli, through whose boss at Goliad Associates, th...

David Medalie's story, The Mistress's Dog , should have been read last year as part of the Caine Prize Shortlist 2009 to 2011 Reading Challenge. I carried it with me but never came around to reading it, perhaps preferring to read the books rather than the single stories or perhaps discouraged by seeming bad taste that I found most of the Caine Prize Shortlist. If any of these was the reason why I failed to complete that challenge last year, then I should have persevered since this is a quite different and hilarious story. The Mistress's Dog  was shortlisted for the 12th Caine Prize for African Writing in 2011 and was included in the Caine Prize for African Writing anthology To See the Mountain and other stories  (2011). However, it was first published in The Mistress's Dog and other stories (1996 - 2010) . The dog had outlived its owner, The Mistress, and was now in the care of Nola. In fact, it had outlived the two individuals who made Nola's life silent...

Officially, I am replacing Proverb Monday - after a year and 56 posts- with Short Story Monday hosted by The Book Mine Set . This is meant to monitor and motivate me to read the  100 short stories  Kinna and I had set for ourselves.  Today's set of stories are from The New Yorker June 14 & 21 2010. This Literary edition of the magazine features eight short stories from eight of magazines 20 under 40 lists . The forty includes some authors as Chimamanda Adichie, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nell Freudenberger, Phillip Meyer, John Ferris, ZZ Packer, Tea Obreht, C.E. Morgan, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum among others. I will be reviewing two of the eight short stories today. I will use this feature as an introduction to several authors I have never read before. The Pilot by Joshua Ferris Joshua Ferris's The Pilot  is a story about a screenwriter recovering from alcoholism. Lawrence Himshell has tasted success before; however, excessive alcohol intake has seen him fal...

Butterfly Dreams was shortlisted for the 12th Caine Prize for African Writing Prize in 2011 . It was part of the crime anthology 'Bad Company' published by Pan Macmillan SA in 2008. It has also been included in the Caine Prize for African Writing 2011 anthology To See the Mountain and other stories. Beatrice Lamwaka's story is a sad one. It is a story that represents the true story of many children caught in the unending conflict between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Uganda government in northern Uganda. This conflict has left in its wake many rape victims and child soldiers. And those who escape from their abductors are left traumatised, needing rehabilitation. It is within this setting that Lamwaka's story is set and told and eleven-year old Lamunu is one of such children. Like all children Lamunu also had a dream, a dream to become a medical doctor and take her mother's profession a step higher. Consequently, she loved to learn. She loved book...

In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata first published as part of the The Bed Book of Short Stories  by Modjaji Books SA in 2010 was shortlisted for the 12th Caine Prize for African Short Stories in 2011 . It is also part of the Caine Prize anthology for 2011, To See the Mountain and other stories. When alive McPhineas Lata was a lover of married women. He was an expert in making women happy, sexually. In fact, he died having sex with another woman. This makes the husbands in the village of Nokanyana an angry and bitter lot. They were therefore glad that he was dead. Consequently, whereas the women were full of dramatic fainting and howls of grief echoing as far as the Ditlhako Hills the men were so much so happy that some carried their own shovels to the cemetery and when the time came to cover up the body, it was carried out in record time. But another problem remained a dead and buried McPhineas Lata didn't mean dead and buried McPhineas Lata memories . [emphasi...