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"Asong's sense of the human predicament is astounding...It is above all, the story of guilt in a world ridden with self-interest."- Professor Rudy Wiebe, University of Alberta --
What happens when a young man of talent and visions of greatness falls victim to a cruel set of circumstances over which he has no control? No Way to Die is such a story. Dennis Nunqam Ndendemajem gives up! Even when he is given a second chance to start again, he refuses to gather the broken pieces of his life together. He refuses to rebuild, and refuses to live. But he also finds no way to die.
Stranger in His Homeland completes the long-awaited trilogy of Linus Asong's fictitious village of Nkokonoko Small Monje, separately treated in The Crown of Thorns and its sequel A Legend of the Dead. However, it leads us back not to events after A Legend of the Dead, but to the crisis that created the passionately exciting The Crown of Thorns. Honest, enthusiastic, arrogant and self-righteous, Antony Nkoaleck, the first graduate of his tribe means well. But his society, entrenched in corruption, sees things differently and therefore judges him according to its own norms. Just one or two errors on Antony's part are enough to cost him his job with the government, the coveted throne of Nkokonoko Small Monje, and finally his life. It is a sad story, strongly reminiscent of Myshkin's fate in Dostoevysky's novel The Idiot, a story in which the Russian novelist vividly shows the inability of any man to bear the burden of moral perfection in an imperfect world.
This study is the first critical examination of the novels of Linus T. Asong, a sharp, compelling, and brutally insightful storyteller, sometimes comical yet with a knack for the distraught, disturbing, and macabre in his throbbing capture and portrayal of society as it functions or as it fails to function. Asong’s novels bring to the fore an unexpected enormous array of characters whose physical appearances and habits are depictions made concrete by potent imagistic words deployed not only to evoke vividness and plausibility, but more specifically to peek into the soul and mental uprightness of persons and society. Hence, they demonstrate the response of the oppressed, exploited, and abused in the face of dysfunctionality, social, and cultural violations and deviations. In this light, the novels are revealed to serve both as testimonies and critiques of the times in which Asong lived. This study, therefore, offers insights into one of the most prolific novelists of Southern Cameroons origins, as well as modern trends in African literature.
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The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology recovers a new regional archive of “black prairie” literature, and includes writing that ranges from work by nineteenth-century black fur traders and pioneers, all of it published here for the first time, to contemporary writing of the twenty-first century. This anthology establishes a new black prairie literary tradition and transforms inherited understandings of what prairie literature looks and sounds like. It collects varied and unique work by writers who were both conscious and unconscious of themselves as black writers or as “prairie” people. Their letters, recipes, oral literature, autobiographies, rap, and poetry- provide vivid glimpses into the reality of their lived experiences and give meaning to them. The book includes introductory notes for each writer in non-specialist language, and notes to assist readers in their engagement with the literature. This archive and its supporting text offer new scholarly and pedagogical possibilities by expanding the nation’s and the region’s archives. They enrich our understanding of black Canada by bringing to light the prairies' black histories, cultures, and presences.
Laughing Store is just what we need in times of troubles and uncertainties such as these. A book of humour from an acclaimed master of laughter, it lifts our hearts and raises our spirits. Jokes that touch about every domain of existence - from sex to religion, from births to deaths, from politics to the beer parlour, from the courtroom to the hospital. And most important of all, conceived in the supremely original Cameroonian flavour of jokes.
When the admirable Kevin Beckongncho becomes the new Paramount Chief of the much-coveted throne of Nkokonoko Small Monje as well as its new DO, Chieftaincy could finally be said to have been redeemed. But he quickly becomes a marked man, as he runs into fatal collision with an unscrupulous governmental system with which he cannot co-exist. How this great man suddenly dies, and why his people must not mourn for him, is the unresolved mystery with which Asong closes both the book and his trilogy that includes The Crown of Thorns and No Way to Die.
The personality of the highly charismatic foremost African Nationalist, Kwame Nkrumah as featured once in a while in Ghanaian fiction. For example, the celebrated Ghanaian novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah draws attention to the corrupt nature of the Nkrumah regime in his famous novel, The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. But this is by far the very first time that Kwame Nkrumah and his era have been made the main subject of a full-length novel.
Journey between the land of the Living and the spirit world in this magical Booker Prize-winning novel 'So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use' Azaro, is a spirit child, who in many traditions of Nigeria exists between life and death. Born into a difficult world, Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Despite belonging to a spirit world made of enchantment, where there is no suffering, Azaro chooses to stay in the land of the Living: to feel it, endure it, know it and love it. This is his story. 'In a magnificent feat of sustained imaginative writing, Okri spins a tale that is epic and intimate at the same time. The Famished Road rekindled my sense of wonder. It made me, at age 50, look at the world through the wide eyes of a child' Michael Palin 'This is a book to generate apostles. People will be moved and, with stars in their eyes, will pass on the word' Time Out 'Ben Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence' Independent on Sunday