Summary
"Okri's new collection of short stories blur parallel realities and walk the line between darkness and magic. Is what you see all there is? Look again. 0Playful, frightening, even shocking - the stories in this collection blur the lines between illusion and reality. This is a writer at the height of... Full description
Summary: |
"Okri's new collection of short stories blur parallel realities and walk the line between darkness and magic. Is what you see all there is? Look again. 0Playful, frightening, even shocking - the stories in this collection blur the lines between illusion and reality. This is a writer at the height of his power, making the reader think, making them laugh, and sometimes making them want to look away while holding their gaze. Stories here are set in London, in Byzantium, in the ghetto, in the Andes, in a printer's shop in Spain. The characters include a murderer, a writer, a detective, a man in a cave, a man in a mirror, two little boys, a prison door, and the author himself. There are twenty-three stories in all. Each one will make you wonder if what you see in the world is all there is ..."--Publisher. |
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Item Description: |
Subtitle taken from dust jacket. |
Physical Description: |
214 pages ; 21 cm |
ISBN: |
9781617758638 1617758639 |
Author Notes: |
After failing to be placed in a university, Okri began writing articles on social and political issues. Most of them were not published, but he began writing short stories based on these articles and they began finding their way into women's journals and evening papers. In 1978, he moved back to England where he studied comparative literature at Essex University but was forced to leave without a degree because of a lack of funds. He was a poetry editor of West Africa and worked also for the BBC. At nineteen, he finished his first novel "Flowers and Shadows" and it was published in 1980. The story attacked corruption in newly independent Nigeria and tells of a successful businessman whose jealous relatives make his life difficult. Okri's second novel, "The Landscapes Within" (1981), traces the adventures of a young, poor painter in Lagos. This novel was followed by two collections of short stories, "Incidents at the Shrine" (1986), and "Starts of the New Curfew" (1988). Several of the stories tell of the Biafran War from a child's eyes. The novel "The Famished Road" (1991) tells the story of a character who must choose between the pain of mortality and the land of the spirits. Okri's next novel, "Songs of Enchantment" (1993), continued with the mythical and poetical view of the world. "An African Elegy" (1992), is a collection of poems with classical themes. Okri has won several awards, which include the Booker Prize (1991), the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa (1987), the Paris Review Aga Khan prize for fiction, the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize, and the Premio Grinzane Cavour. (Bowker Author Biography) |