Novels are movies on pages. If you are looking for books to spend time with this weekend, you may want to check out these four:
Thirteen Months of Sunrise, by Rania Mamoun, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette (Comma Press, 2019)
In this powerful debut collection of stories, Rania Mamoun expertly blends the real and the imagined to create a rich, complex, and moving portrait of contemporary Sudan. A young woman sits by her father’s deathbed, lamenting her failure to keep a promise to him. A struggling writer walks every inch of the city in search of inspiration, only to find it is much closer than she imagined. A girl collapses from hunger at the side of the road and is rescued by the most unlikely of saviors.
From painful encounters with loved ones to unexpected new friendships, Mamoun illuminates the breadth of human experience. She explores, with humor and compassion, the alienation, isolation, and estrangement that characterize urban life.
Shut Up You’re Pretty, by Téa Mutonji (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019)
In Tea Mutonji’s disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides to shave her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator’s experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humor, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanhood, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed.
Minutes of Glory: and Other Stories, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (The New Press, 2019)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, honed his craft as a short story writer. This collection spans his career, from “The Fig Tree” (“Mugumo” in this collection), written in 1960 during his first year as an undergraduate at Makerere University College in Uganda, to the playful “The Ghost of Michael Jackson,” written while he was a professor at the University of California, Irvine. These stories reveal a master of the short form, covering the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence. The collection includes two stories never before published in the United States.
Ngũgĩ’s stories feature women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society, powerful men in their Bentleys who have inherited authority from the British, and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden.
Speak Gigantular, by Irenosen Okojie (Jacaranda Books, 2016)
Okojie’s collection of stories is captivating, erotic, enigmatic, and disturbing. Irenosen Okojie’s gift lies in her understated humor, light touch, razor-sharp assessment of the best and worst of humankind, and her unflinching gaze into the darkest corners of human experience. Okojie has created a world with errant Londoners caught between here and the hereafter, where insensitive men cheat on their mistresses and can only muster enough interest to fall for one-dimensional poster girls, and where brave young women attempt to be erotically empowered at their own peril. Sexy, serious, and at times downright disturbing, this brilliant debut collection sizzles with originality.
