Edwidge Danticat has a way of making small lives tell big stories. Gently and quietly, she writes the outrageous and compels us, her readers, to become intimate with tragedies that are at once ...
Tag: Diaspora
A Study in African Realism
We are pleased to accompany Ian Baucom’s review of Americanah with video of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in conversation with Professor Baucom and PhD student Ainehi Edoro at a public event hosted by ...
Giving Birth to a Country
In NoViolet Bulawayo’s shattering debut novel, We Need New Names, proper nouns contain continents. Paradise is the ironically named Zimbabwean shantytown where the book’s ten-year-old protagonist and ...
Where Fragile Things Die
In 2005, long before Taiye Selasi was being hailed for her fiction writing as “a totally new and near perfect voice,” she published a brief online essay that sought to define the emerging cohort of ...
When the Diaspora Is Enuf
Quiet as it’s kept, some of us colored-girl creative-writer types kept our cool circa 2006 when that gelato-dripping, Gita-flipping, Bali-bossa-nova-ing best seller Eat, Pray, Love went multi ...
To Lose Everything (To War)
“What is it like to lose everything?” the young protagonist of Stephen Dau’s first novel, The Book of Jonas, is asked again and again by those hoping to fathom his experience of losing his entire ...
Lost and Found: Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong
The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, Aimee Phan’s ambitious first novel, makes a striking contribution to the growing field of Vietnamese diasporic literature. As bearers of a traumatic history of ...
Binocular Vision, or Anne FrankDoesn’t Live Here Anymore
Do we know how to talk about Jewish writers when they are not talking about Anne Frank? Around the time that Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories won the National Book Critics ...