Sunday, July 12, 2015

The ten best short story collections you've never read

Mia Alvar's debut story collection is In the Country. One entry on her list of the ten best short story collections you've never read:
Girls At War and Other Stories by Chinua Achebe

These bleak, unflinching tales of bureaucrats and schoolchildren, soldiers and housewives during the Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s are far from an easy or comfortable read. Yet even as Achebe traces just how quickly political ideals and worthy causes can decay into corruption and opportunism, he maintains a deep empathy for all his flawed characters, not to mention a sometimes gut-wrenching humor, throughout each story. “Let no one be fooled by our writing in English, for we intend to do untold things with it,” he famously declared of Anglophone African writers like himself, and so here he does.
Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue