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Her talents were immediately recognized and she was brought in to shadow editors on projects.Ībout a year later, a project came in that Adegbonmire connected to on a personal level-Faridah Abike-Iyimide’s Ace of Spades, which was pitched as Gossip Girl meets Get Out. In mid-2019, Adegbonmire joined the team at Feiwel and Friends, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, as an editorial assistant. Instead, she applied to internships and got her first position at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. But as graduation approached and she had yet to finish her novel, she had to rethink her plans.
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A challenging but wonderfully strange read.When Foyinsi Adegbonmire was in college, her career goal was to be a bestselling writer before she graduated. I found The Obscene Bird of Nightby José Donoso while browsing at Walden Pond Books, one of my favorite independent bookstores in Oakland. Tholukuthi this one’s hard it’s probably between One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.I could only have discovered at…: An imitable writer whose pen tends toward difficult subjects, Yvonne Vera is adept at looking trauma in the eye and writing it with such devastating beauty.I’ve re-read the most: “I was not sorry when my brother died,” from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s powerful classic Nervous Conditionsis both stunning and unforgettable.has the greatest ending:īutterfly Burningby Yvonne Vera. Right now I’m obsessing over the title, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones.has the best opening line: The Bread the Devil Kneadby Lisa Allen-Agostini stuck to my head and wouldn’t give me peace until I had to get the book, which I couldn’t put down. The Sex Lives of African Womenby Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is so important and groundbreaking in its treatment of African women’s sexualities it deserves to be consumed in every possible medium a docuseries would be a great way to widen its reach.I last bought:įor my niece, because it’s an incendiary feminist manifesto, Mona Eltahawy’s The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls.has the best title: Shelf Life: Sarah Polley …I’d like turned into a Netflix show: I’m in awe of how it managed to be the funniest book I’ve ever read while still tackling some serious themes. Winkler is a morbid trip into the mind of a madman. Home is Not a Country by Safia Elhillo is a haunting, gorgeous novel-in-verse about identity and belonging. The Eternal Audience of Oneby Rémy Ngamije, The Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller, The Houseguestby Amparo Dávila. And because I’m prone to binging, I immediately found her Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, and inhaled it. Yoko Ogawa’s beautiful and moving novel, The Housekeeper and the Professor. I didn’t think I’d ever cry “ngi-ngi” over a book, but, dear reader, I cried “ngi-ngi” over this one book.I read in one sitting, it was that good: The devastating ending of The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi undid me. This harrowing but ultimately hopeful book kept me turning the pages. You rightly know her for her incisive nonfiction she’s also a riveting storyteller. The book that: …kept me up way too late:Īn Untamed State by Roxane Gay. She eventually changed it: “No” means “with” in her first language Ndebele Violet was the name of her mother, who died when the author was 18 months old Bulawayo is the name of the town where she grew up. She switched from law to writing as an undergraduate at Kalamazoo Valley Community College (where she worked at a grocery store) before moving on to Texas A&M, Cornell (where she got her MFA) and Stanford, first as a Stegner Fellow and now as Jones Lecturer in Fiction.īorn Elizabeth Zandile Tshele, she didn’t learn her given name until first grade because of the cultural practice of giving nicknames. The California-based Bulawayo, who first wrote poetry before fiction, comes from a line of storytellers – her grandmother, whose tales were filled with talking animals and alternate universes, and her late father, who was a retired police officer. She spent a year there while writing the recently published Glory (Viking), a political allegory based on the overthrow of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, with talking animals populating a fictitious country. The first chapter of the book also won the Caine Prize for African Writing. NoViolet Bulawayo left Zimbabwe as an 18-year-old to study law in the United States and returned for an extended stay almost two decades later as an award-winning author, including as a finalist for the Man Booker Prize for her 2013 debut, We Need New Names, the first Black African woman and first Zimbabwean to make the short list.