by Anja Choon Naija Stories: Of Tears and Kisses, Heroes and Villains edited by Myne Whitman is a collection of thirty short stories by Nigerians about life in Nigeria except for one story, which plays in the Nigerian Diaspora. Apart from this shared element, the stories are very diverse. Many, many topics Two stories touched me the most. The first [...]

chimamanda adichie has a wonderful piece in newsweek, reposted in the daily beast, that asks whether the jury would have believed dominique strauss-kahn or his alleged victim, guinean immigrant nafissatou diallo. On television, she was familiar: the skin tone that suggested cheap bleaching creams, the ambitious hair weave, the melodrama. An American friend of mine thought her interview too theatrical [...]

by Aloofar

by Temie Giwa
A review of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Wizard’s Tale

Sometime ago in May, at a house party in a friend’s house – an artist, I found myself seated around a table with a few elderly women who grew up in Mississippi in the 60s. One of them is my friend’s mother – a seventy year old professor of history in my institution. The conversation they were having was about [...]

Author – Jacqueline Maduneme Publisher/ Date – Pointed Arrows (May 2011) Book Title – Ada’s Daughter (356 pages) Genre – Memoir (Dysfunctional Families) Reviewer – Myne Whitman Source – Review Copy from Author   The memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off, in its insistence that the author plumbs the depths of their psyche to make sense of [...]

Peeping Dom ‘Wiping the unbelieving suds from his eyes, Dominique peeped once more through the judas hole in the bathroom door. He saw the panty-hosed assassin sent by Nicolas lean forward to pull out a gold-plated .22 derringer pistol from her patent-leather boot. She was standing near the door, her back turned to it. He knew he could easily handle [...]

the guardian asked zadie smith, one of a handful of contemporary writers, to comment on her rules for writing. since i found zadie’s list to be depressing, pessimistic, and utterly without joy, i wrote my own.  keep in mind that i am not an award-winning published author, although that doesn’t mean i’m not also a writer. 1. write first thing in the [...]