Literature
The Late Kola Onadipehad a career both in education and business.
Will she survive these ordeals and return home...... and under what circumstances?
Did he survive the ordeal, ........ and what was the result of his experience?
Now, almost two decades after the original volume, Oxford is proud to announce a thoroughly updated second edition, including for the first time the texts of The Reign of Edward III and Sir Thomas More, recognizing these two plays officially as authentic works by Shakespeare. This beautiful collection is the product of years of full-time research by a team of British and American scholars and represents the most thorough examination ever undertaken of the nature and authority of Shakespeare's work. The editors reconsidered every detail of the text in the light of modern scholarship and they thoroughly re-examined the earliest printed versions of the plays, firmly establishing the canon and chronological order of composition. All stage directions have been reconsidered in light of original staging, and many new directions for essential action have been added. This superb volume also features a brief introduction to each work as well as an illuminating General Introduction. Finally, the editors have added a wealth of secondary material, including an essay on language, a list of contemporary allusions to Shakespeare, an index of Shakespearean characters, a glossary, a consolidated bibliography, and an index of first lines of the Sonnets.
Compiled by the world's leading authorities, packed with information, and attractively designed, The Oxford Shakespeare is the gold standard of Shakespearean anthologies.
So, are you torn between the height you have attained and the dark secrets that keep threatening your light? Are you caught in a web of confusion with no idea why you are created? Are you struggling with the pain you feel as you strive to actualise your purpose in life? Have you tried everything possible to ensure you step out of the dark and let the world see your light? In Understanding Power and Accomplishing Purpose, Debby critically highlights those ups and downs using scriptural teachings with poetry pari pasu life experiences of individuals shared in the book to explain how difficult - but easy – it is, actualising God’s purpose on earth.
Understanding Power & Accomplishing Purpose is an eye opener to purpose in pain. Everyone seeking an explanation to their pain and suffering should get a copy of this book.
A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie’s letter of response.
Here are fifteen invaluable suggestions–compelling, direct, wryly funny, and perceptive–for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. From encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, makeup, and sexuality; debunking the myth that women are somehow biologically arranged to be in the kitchen making dinner, and that men can “allow” women to have full careers, Dear Ijeawele goes right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century. It will start a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.
- Chinua Achebe
"I am an Okigbo evangelist... Christopher Okigbo is a great poet whose lines everybody should know by heart. They are tremendously beautiful."
Celebrated writer and winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction.- Ben Okri
"Steeped alike in Western Modernist aestheticsandmyth-makingtraditions of his Igbo background, he fused worlds with an assurance that married lyric and epic, audacity and grace. This collection… will remind existing readers of Okigbo's prowess and dazzle new ones."
Literary editor of The Independent and former judge of the Booker Prize, and Commonwealth Prize.-Boyd Tonkin
Year of Publication: 2015
103 pages
Year of Publication: 2017
377 pages
There can be no better platform to register the debt that Osundare owes his parentage, the rigorous discipline of his mentors and the diverse environments in which his outlook on the world has been shaped than this carefully crafted biography. Egya highlights Osundare’s prodigious talent, his unwavering ethical compass, his infectious humanism, his enduring faith in the capacity of literature to reshape the world, and the harmony between his creative imagination and polemical writing. Readers and critics will find the biography an indispensable companion to reading Osundare not just because of the illuminating personal and cultural information that it offers, but also because it equally periodizes Osundare’s work in a way no other book has done.
Prof. Oyeniyi Okunoye, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife
In Niyi Osundare: A Literary Biography, Sule E. Egya takes us on a journey of the life experiences of the artist-scholar Niyi Osundare. Indeed, there are some books a reader just can’t put down. This is one of them. It takes you to the other worlds beyond the popular world of artistry and scholarship of one of Africa’s most accomplished men of letters.
Dr. Ogaga Okuyade, Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sule E. Egya is professor of African Literature and Cultural Studies at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria. He was formerly Head of the Department of English and Dean of Faculty of Languages and Communication Studies. Widely published and travelled, his interests include literature and politics, literature and the environment, literary theory, and creative writing. He is also an award-winning writer, having authored works of poetry and fiction under the style name E. E. Sule. Among his works are Sterile Sky, winner of the 2013 Commonwealth Prize Africa Region, and the AHP-sponsored Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English.
Dialogue With My Country, Niyi Osundare’s latest book, which is a compilation of articles written under his 24-year-old column in Newswatch, makes a debut
Niyi Osundare, poet, writer and professor of English, is an angry man. Last week, many who gathered at the presentation of his book titled: Dialogue With My Country, caught a glimpse of his feeling of anger which emitted from the pages of the compilation of his column in Newswatch magazine. For 24 years through the magazine, Osundare had used the pen as a dagger to disembowel the high and the mighty in the society.
Keith Richards, managing director of Promasidor, who reviewed the book, aptly captured Osundare’s anger in his review. “While this is a collection that contains both wit and wisdom, it is fundamentally an angry book. The quiet rage may be contained in a wrapper of humour and softened by the style and pedigree of his prose but Osundare is true to his belief that the basis of all art is justice.”
According to Richards, not only were the issues raised in the column relevant today, but they were also prescient. When Osundare’s column criticised the Structural Adjustment Programme, SAP, of the time, he didn’t envisage that to date Nigerians would still be talking about the seven-point agenda and though he decried the National Electric Power Authority, NEPA, the Power Holding Company Nigeria, PHCN, is still a problem. He had written against campuses emptied by cultism in the past, yet today, they are laid to waste by Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU. In March 1993, he wrote surely, Nigeria’s democratic experimentation must be the most expensive in the world. He probably had not imagined that today the cost of the legislature would be colossal. “It is no wonder that the satire and ridicule that appealed to Newswatch readers originally should be so contemporary till this very moment. It is no wonder that Osundare’s wit and humour, his passion and connection barely disguise his anger and frustration,” Richards said.
Richards said the book is a must read for those who want to know more about Nigeria. For one, it prompted memories and sometimes a bitter smile of reminiscence for older Nigerians. For younger Nigerians, especially those educated abroad who are disappointed with the economic situation in the country today, it facilitates a greater understanding of those with a touch of grey hair. For expatriates ready to learn more of the background to the frustrations and anger felt by those who thought that this democracy would be the realisation of years of hope, it provides insight.
Dan Agbese, editor-in-chief of Newswatch magazine couldn’t agree more. Agbese, who was the moderator at the book presentation, had also edited Osundare’s column for the past 24 years and attested that the writer was indeed filled with a unique kind of rage that was surrounded with a bout of humour. “To me, he projects two charming personae. As a man, he is humorous but when he sits before his word processor, all traces of humour and laughter vanish because as a writer and social commentator, he is an angry man. Angry at a country that promises so much, yet delivers so little. Angry at our leaders, in khaki or agbada, for failing us and making a career and fortunes from our misfortunes,” he said.
Agbese said the title of the book: Dialogue with My Country is like a cruel pun on the word ‘dialogue’ because columnists in Nigeria always seemed to be talking to themselves. Agbese believes that Osundare’s choice of the book title was meant to be understood as a dialogue of the deaf because though Osundare had been talking for 24 years, nobody has been listening.
BOMBOY is a story about Leke, a troubled young man living in the suburbs of Cape Town. He develops strange habits of stalking people, stealing small objects and going from doctor to doctor in search of companionship rather than cure. Through a series of letters written to him by his Nigerian father whom he has never met, Leke learns about a family curse; a curse which his father had unsuccessfully tried to remove. BomBoy is a well-crafted, and complex narrative written with a sensitive understanding of both the smallness and magnitude of a single life.
As the title suggests, The Trials of Brother Jero is about a charlatan preacher, Brother Jero. Brother Jero is a cunning beach diviner who woos customers (penitents) to his church by using Christian superstition for his own salvation. For him, the church is a business. He says:
‘I am glad I got here before any customers-I mean worshipers.. l always get a feeling every morning that am a shopkeeper waiting for customers.’
Brother Jero is suave while his followers are gullible. He lures people to his church by promising them material gains and promotions through prayer. Chume his assistant often seeks for permission to beat his arrogant wife Amope but Brother Jero disagrees:
‘ I keep my followers dissatisfied because if they are satisfied, they won’t come again..’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
Ogochukwu PROMISE (fiction writer, poet, essayist, playwright; Nigeria) is the founder and coordinator of the Lumina Foundation which instituted the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa; she also initiated the Get Africa Reading Project and runs a mobile library. Ogochukwu edits and publishes the literary magazine The Lumina, and the magazine Children's Classic. An author of 16 novels, six collections of poetry, two short story collections, four plays, two essay collections, thirty children's books, and editor of four literary collections, she has received seven Association of Nigerian Authors awards for her poetry and fiction. She participates courtesy of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.
During the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) Wole Soyinka was arrested and incarcerated for twenty-two months, most of it spent in solitary confinement in a cell, 4ft by 8ft. His offence: assisting the Biafran secessionists.
The Man Died, now regarded as a classic of prison literature, is a product of this experience. What comes through in the compelling narrative is the author's uncompromising, principled stand on the universality and indivisibility of freedom and human rights.
You Must Set Forth at Dawnis a book full of revelations, which in actuality brings into public glare the political animal in Soyinka and the extent to which he was steeped in national politics, which may led some political leaders to see him as meddlesome. While his dalliance with Biafra earned him a prison term and resulted in his book, The Man Died” he maintained some questionable affinity to General Babangida and loathed General Abacha. Indeed, it was said, that it was Soyinka who gave Gen. Abacha the moniker “deaf and dumb.”
Mr. Soyinka's style tends to be a little heavy on grammar but overall it is a great book, one that you will love to have bought.
…..a poetically evocative story, rich in texture and vivid descriptions…emotionally accessible and moving…an impressive debut novel.
Okereke’s greatest skill lies in her avoidance of moralising while telling this engaging, modern-day morality tale.
- Financial Times.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chioma OkerekeChioma Okereke was born in Benin City, Nigeria and moved to London at the age of seven. She started her writing career as a poet before turning her hand to fiction. Her work has been shortlisted in the Undiscovered Authors Competition 2006, run by Bookforce UK, and in the Daily Telegraph ‘Write a Novel in a Year’ Competition 2007. Bitter Leaf is her first novel.
Bolanle, a graduate amongst the semi-literate wives, is hated from the start. Baba Segi's glee at bagging a graduate doesn't help matters. Worse, Bolanle's arrival threatens to do more than simply ruffle feathers. She's unwittingly set to expose a secret that her co-wives intend to protect, at all costs.
Lola Shoneyin's light and ironic touch exposes not only the rotten innards of Baba Segi's polygamous household in this cleverly plotted story; it also shows how women no educated or semi-literate, women in contemporary Nigeria can be as restricted, controlled and damaged by men - be they fathers, husbands, uncles, rapists - as they've never been.
A well written account of childhood in pre independence Yorubaland. Although it is probably not typical, it illustrates the essence of the Yoruba parenting style, a style that makes every adult a parent and every child dutiful. I recommend it.
Ama Ata Aidoo was born in Abeadzi Kyiakor in what was then the Gold Coast (later Ghana) in 1940 and grew up in a Fante royal household. She attended Wesley Girls’ High School in Cape Coast and then the University of Ghana at Legon from 1961-1964 where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English. During this time, she also wrote her first play, ‘The Dilemma of a Ghost’, which came out in 1965 and made her the first African woman dramatist to be published.
Since then, Aidoo has written other plays, novels, short stories and poetry as well as numerous essays on African literature and the status of women in African society. One of her best known novels is ‘Our Sister Killjoy, or, Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint’ (1977). She has won many literary awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Africa) for her second novel, ‘Changes: a Love Story’ (1991). Aidoo’s works of fiction deal with the tension between Western and African world views and the politics of gender and sexual inequality in African society.
In addition to her literary career, Aidoo was appointed Minister of Education under the Provisional National Defence Council in 1982, but resigned after 18 months. She then moved to Zimbabwe to become a full-time writer. She has also lived and worked in the US, the UK and Germany. Aidoo was a long-term Visiting Professor in Africana Studies and the Literary Arts at Brown University.
Book by Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe's books are being read throughout the Engish-speaking world. They have been translated into more than fifty languages. ...
Authors: Chinua Achebe, Bernth Lindfors
Copyright date: October 1, 1997