I enjoy short stories that are quick, witty, and suspenseful, especially when they’re African and told in a traditional style.
If you have some free time, grab a cold drink, open up these short stories, and enjoy the read.
1. Love is Power, Or Something Like That: Stories, by A. Igoni Barrett (Graywolf Press, 2013)
In these wide-ranging stories, A. Igoni Barrett roams the streets with people from all stations of life. A man with acute halitosis navigates the chaos of the Lagos bus system. A minor policeman, full of the authority and corruption of his uniform, beats his wife. A family’s fortunes fall from love and wealth to infidelity and poverty, as poor choices unfurl over three generations. With humor and tenderness, Barrett introduces us to an utterly modern Nigeria, where desire is a means to an end, and love is a power as real as money.
2. Rain and Other Stories, by Mia Couto, translated by Eric M. B. Becker (Biblioasis, 2017)
Published in the aftermath of Mozambique’s bloody civil war, Mia Couto’s third collection seeks out the places violence could not reach, the places where, the author writes, “every man is the same: pretending he’s here, dreaming of going away, and plotting his return.” Shifting masterfully between forms—creation tale to meditation, playful comedy to magical twist—these stories grapple with questions of what’s been lost and what can be reclaimed, what future exists for a country that broke the yoke of colonialism only to descend into internecine war, what is Mozambican and what is Mozambique. Following fishermen and fortune-tellers, widows and drunks, and one errant hippopotamus, this new translation of stories by the Man Booker-listed author of Confession of the Lioness rediscovers possibility and what it means to be reborn.
3. Dog Meat Samosa, by Stanley Gazemba (Regal House Publishing, 2019)
Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, is a rambling traffic-choked metropolis, bursting at the seams with people striving to earn a living on its mean streets.
While Nairobi has every appearance of a fast-growing, modern African city with the mushrooming skyscrapers and superhighways, the city possesses a dark underbelly. Dog Meat Samosa explores the bowels of Nairobi’s crowded urban backstreets to paint a gritty picture of its underworld, to describe the human experience within this once glorious “City in the Sun” that has since metamorphosed into a cutthroat hustlers’ paradise.
4. The Cape Cod Bicycle War: and Other Stories, by Billy Kahora (Huza Press/Ohio University Press, 2019/2020)
Each of the realistic worlds Billy Kahora brings us in the short stories and novella that make up The Cape Cod Bicycle War and Other Stories explores the tensions and transitions of characters moving between youthful folly and a precarious adulthood. In the title story, immigrant workers with varying ambitions work at a Wendy’s in wintry Cape Cod. Sharing one house, they must also share, or rather compete for, bicycles—crucial transportation—which are in short supply.
In other stories, a young man caught between a broken family and political violence befriends an aged gorilla in a Nairobi zoo; a pastor struggles to come to terms with the arrest of his brother, who is suspected of terrorism; and a dissolute bank employee on a serious bender returns to work to face a review board.
5. The Quarter, by Naguib Mahfouz, translated by Roger Allen (Saqi Books, 2019)
Meet the people of Cairo’s Gamaliya quarter. There is Nabqa, son of Adam the waterseller who can only speak truths; the beautiful and talented Tawhida who does not age with time; Ali Zaidan, the gambler, late to love; and Boss Saqr who stashes his money above the bath. A neighbourhood of demons, dancing and sweet halva, the quarter keeps quiet vigil over the secrets of all who live there.
This collection by pre-eminent Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz was recently discovered among his old papers. Found with a slip of paper titled ‘for publishing 1994’, they are published here for the first time. Resplendent with Mahfouz’s delicate and poignant observations of everyday happenings, these lively stories take the reader deep into the beating heart of Cairo.
*Grab one, two or the whole five and enjoy this weekend.
