Knopf
Price: $24.95
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CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
reads from her new collection of stories
The Thing Around Your Neck
Harvard Book Store is thrilled to welcome back the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, for a reading from her new collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck. In these twelve stories, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, exploring the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. “Extremely rewarding.... Adichie’s growth into one of the language’s most powerful storytellers is palpable [as her] language ascends to the level of the best writers, both compressed to a minute grain, and yet expansive in the way only finely wrought short stories can be.... The integrity of the author, as she tackles the core morality of [her themes], is in full evidence. We can clearly see where her strengths, in style and content, ought to lead her in the future. This is both the roadmap of an unfolding major career, as well as a view of the library which got her here.” –Anis Shivani, Brooklyn Rail
“This stunning collection confirms Adichie’s position as one of Africa’s brightest new literary stars. She is the author of two important novels about the Igbo people of Nigeria...yet her writing is even more poignant when applied to the short story: crisp, succinct, vigorous and loaded.... While there is a sense of anger at the injustices that Nigerians have to endure in their home country, these stories also question whether life in the US is any better. Many of the immigrants’ stories are driven by loneliness and alienation and some do decide to return home–for better or worse. Adichie offers insights into both worlds and, like all fine storytellers, leaves us wanting more.” –The Times (London)
“Confirms [Adichie’s] status as a first-rate storyteller. In the sublime title story, a young Nigerian émigré, a winner of an American visa lottery, expresses her choking loneliness as she scrapes for a living and for love in Connecticut.... These sparkling stories explore loneliness, identity, violence, betrayal, middle-class obsessions, the bond between parents and children, and the emigrant and colonial experiences. [Adichie] casts a fearless and caustic eye on the corruption that Nigerians endured under a military dictatorship and on what she perceives to be the fatuousness of the American way of life.” –Irish Independent
“There is an understated beauty to Adichie’s deceptively simple prose: it remains cool, dispassionate and controlled, and leads you easily through unfamiliar and unexpected scenarios.... The Nigerian stories, and ‘Ghosts’ in particular, offer windows on experience that radiate with compassion.... There is a lyrical ache in this simple tale that recalls Gabriel García Márquez’s beautiful novella Nobody Writes To The Colonel–quite an achievement for such a young writer.” –Metro (UK)
“Superb. With minimal fuss [these stories] present snapshots of Nigerian life.... The title story tracks the life of a young woman sent to the US by her family.... It is memorably, heartbreakingly sad.... Both as a person and a writer, [Adichie] is engaged in an ongoing project of rebellion against the expectations of others–of those who want to be able to tell her what the world is like, and what her place in it should be.” –The Observer
“The strains and betrayals involved in fleeing one culture for another figure prominently [in The Thing Around Your Neck] with the uprooted heroines caught between the devil of a dysfunctional homeland and the deep blue sea of suburban America. Adichie has a flair for drama, particularly where violence is involved. Not too many writers could carry off a beheading with [her] confident, mid-sentence insouciance.... The writing throughout the book has a verve that propels you forward through its pages.” –The Guardian
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The O. Henry Prize Stories, 2003; The New Yorker; Granta; the Financial Times; and Zoetrope. Her most recent novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Broadband Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; it was a New York Times Notable Book and a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. A recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
Photo: Beowulf Sheehan / PEN American Center.
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