Literature

The Adventures of Souza: A rascally village boy goes hunting, enrolls in a secret cult, meets a magician and engages in other adventures. What were his experiences?

The Late Kola Onadipe had a career both in education and business.

The Boy Slave. Shettima was born near the edge of the Sahara in 1865. He was captured by slavers and sold into a strange new life.

The Return of the Boy Slave: In Kola Onadipe's book, The Boy Slave, Shettima grows up in slavery. This is the story of how, having won his freedom, he uses it to fight against the slave traders.

Hailed by The Washington Post as "a definitive synthesis of the best editions" and by The Times of London as "a monument to Shakespearean scholarship," The Oxford Shakespeare is the ultimate anthology of the Bard's work: the most authoritative edition of the plays and poems ever published.

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.

Life becomes tough when you are faced with difficult circumstances, societal hindrances and the drive to fulfill your purpose on earth. Then it becomes difficult to understand the reason for your pain when placed on a scale with God’s word and the intent for your life. The question is, what do you do in those times?

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.

From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today–written as a letter to a friend.
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.

This special, large-format, lavishly-illustrated edition of Things Fall Apart, 'Africa's best loved novel', is a timely tribute to  'the father of modern African Literature'. It is published to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of a book now considered a classic of African and World Literature. This edition uniquely blends the enduring simplicity of Achebe's tale with the creative visual talents of some of Nigeria's best and bright contemporary artists. The result is a book that will appeal to lovers of African Literature and Art the world over. A treasured testament to the art of story-tellling, Things Fall Apart Illustrated is bound to become a collector's item.

“…He was not only the finest poet of his generation but I believe that as his work becomes better and more widely known in the world he will also be recognised as one of the most remarkable anywhere in our time…”
- 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 aesthetics andmyth -making traditions 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

This engaging, thought-provoking lecture triggers crucial questions: Why is the 'state' in Africa often a colossal 'millstone' rather than a 'cornerstone' of development? Why have African states, post-independence, retained inherited colonial structures? Why are people in many parts of Africa poorer today than at independence, and standards of living and security have depreciated? The author posits that the African continent needs a 'second independence' in which the primary aim would be to reclaim the state for citizens; not by bypassing the state but by making the state a genuine partner for development.

Year of Publication: 2015

103 pages

Nigeria's Nollywood has rapidly grown into one of the world's largest film industries, radically altering media environments across Africa and in the diaspora. It has also become one of African culture's most consequential expressions, powerfully shaping how Africans see themselves and are seen by others. With this book, Jonathan Haynes provides an accessible and au­thoritative introduction to this vast industry and its film culture. Haynes describes the major Nigerian film genres and how they relate to Nigerian society—its values, desires, anxieties, and social tensions. He interprets these generic stories and the cast of mythic figures within them: the long-suffering wives, the business tricksters, the Bible-wielding pastors, the kings in their traditional regalia, the glamorous young professionals, the emigrants stranded in New York or London, and all the rest. Based on more than twenty years of research and with vivid descriptions of Nollywood's landmark films and leading directors, this is a book of unprecedented scope on a major branch of world cinema.

Year of Publication: 2017

377 pages

In this literary biography, Sule E. Egya, one of Nigeria’s most promising scholar-critics, brings the skills of the storyteller and the scholar to bear on his recreation of the Osundare story. The result is a readable coming-of-age story that traces the writer’s development from his rural and agrarian roots in Nigeria, through his education in Africa, Europe and North America, to his rise to prominence as one of the most versatile poets writing in English today.

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.

Previously unpublished, Salutation to the Gut is an essay Soyinka wrote more than forty years ago. The essay is a celebration of Yoruba culture, in particular Yoruba food and gastronomic culture. Its witty and whimsical style foreshadows the kind of writing that would become Soyinka's hallmark, and for which he would subsequently win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Nigeria as a country is bedevilled by myriads of paradoxes. These unite to dwarf its stature and hence there have been popular calls for a National Conference. Yet the powers-that-be oppose its convening with overt recalcitrance prompting Soyinka at Emeka Anyaoku's 70'" Birthday to articulate his position once again and ask "Will the National Conference open up a Pandora's Box?"

Death and the King's Horseman is a play by Wole Soyinka based on a real incident that took place in Nigeria during British colonial rule: the ritual suicide of the horseman of an important chief was prevented by the intervention of the colonial authorities. In addition to the British intervention, Soyinka calls the horseman's own conviction toward suicide into question, posing a problem that throws off the community's balance.

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.

The Nobel Laureate's reputation as a dramatist tends to cloud his poetic achievement, and in modern African literature, poetry lives in the shadow of fiction. The criticism of Soyinka's poetry has so far centred on his themes of individuality and death, his imagery, and on the controversy over his authenticity, obscurity and difficulty. Here, in a new approach, an academic himself and one of the leading younger generation of African poets, discusses critically the voice and viewpoint of the poet with the object of establishing Soyinka's persona. The book covers the personality and world view of the man, as revealed in his poetry.

This Volume consists of African Proverbs I, II, and III

Bitter Leaf is a richly textured, poetic and evocatively imagined tale about love and loss, parental and filial bonds, and everything in between that makes life bittersweet.

…..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.

The contents of a tin box – a handful of letters; old journals with marked pages and annotations; school reports; notebook jottings; tax and other levy receipts; minutes of meetings; and programme notes of special events – which belonged to his father, S. A. (“Essay”) Soyinka, a school teacher during the colonial period in Nigeria, provide the grist for Isara: A Voyage Around Essay, the second instalment of Wole Soyinka's memoirs – a son's fictionalised “voyage” into the life and times of his father.

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.

The volume ‘Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70: A Reader in African Cultural Studies’ (2012) pays tribute to a woman writer from the African continent who has touched worldwide audiences and acknowledges her status as a ‘literary mover and shaker’. The literary-criticism core of the book is complemented by papers on such issues as African oratory, new media, popular culture texts, African identity, race construction and gendered image.

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.

In this book, Soyinka argues that all claims that Africa has been explored are as premature as news of her imminent demise. A truly illuminating exploration of Africa has yet to take place. It does not pretend to take place even on the pages of this book, being content with retrieving a few grains for germination from the wasteful threshing floor of Africa's existential totality.

PRAISES ABOUT THE BOOK

Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent.— from the publisher

Akpan reveals Africas pain ,pity, joy, and grace, and comes closer to the truth about modern Africa than the entire outpourings of the Western mass media - GUARDIAN

Say You’re One of Them is a wholly unflinching vision of Africa through the eyes of five children in five countries.

Akpan transports the reader into gritty scenes of chaos and fear in his rich debut collection of five long stories set in war-torn Africa. Akpans prose is beautiful and his stories are insightful and revealing...
- Publishers Weekly

The humor, the endurance, the horrors and grace-Akpan has captured all of it... The Stories are not amazing and moving, and imbued with a powerful moral courage – they are also surprisingly expert... Beautifully constructed, stately in a way that offsets their impoverished scenarios. Akpan wants you to see and feel Africa, its glory and its pain. And you do, which makes this an extraordinary book.
- O Magazine

Akpans Africa is a messy violent place... and its innocent kids are what pull at our heartstrings.
- The Guardian

A startling debut collection... Akpan fuses a knowledge of African poverty and strife with a conspicuously literary approach to storytelling. Filtering tales of horror through the wide eyes of the young
- Tower Books

Uwem Akpan writes with a political fierceness and a humanity so full of compassion it might just change the world. His is a burning talent.
- Chris ABANI

An important literary debut... juxtaposed against the clarity and revelation in Akpans prose – as translucent a style as I have read in a long while – we find subjects that nearly render the mind helpless and throw the heart into a hopeless erratic rhythm out of fear, out of pity, out of the shame of being only a few degrees of separation removed from these monstrous modern circumstances... The reader discovers that no hiding place is good enough with these stories battering at your mind and heart.
- Chicago Tribune

Left me gasping! - Opray Winfrey

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Fr. Uwem was born on Ikot Akpan Eda, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. After attending Queen of Apostles Minor Seminary, Afaha  Obong, he studied at Creighon and Gonzaga universities, USA, and at Hekima College, Kenya. Ordained in 2003, he received his MFA in creative writing from the Univeristy of Michigan in 2006. Published in 2008, Say You are One of Them, his first book, has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, Africa Region; PEN/ Beyond  Margins Award and the Hurston/ Wright Legacy Award. It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Dayton Literacy Peace Prize. Fr. Uwem was also nominated for the (UK) Guardian First Book Award and for the Caine Prize for African. He is the first Nigerian writer to win the Prestigious Oprah Winfrey Bookclub endorsement. Fr. Uwem lives in Nigeria.

Twelve dazzling short stories exploring the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States: In 'A Private Experience,' a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman. 

The young mother in 'Imitation' finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when her husband moves his mistress into their Lagos home. The title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl in an America that is nothing like the country she expected. 

Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map the collision of cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers.

 

About the Author:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages. From the award-winning author, comes a new work 'Amaericanah' a powerful story of love, race and identity.Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, published by Algonquin in 2003, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her novel Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Broadband Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, was the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

Americanah is a fearless novel set in Nigeria, England and America. It boldly takes on issues both big and small: love, race, home, hair, Obama, immigration, and self-invention. In the early 1990s, under Abacha’s government, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. People are leaving the country if they can and Ifemelu leaves for America, where alongside defeats and triumphs, she confronts the inevitable question of race. Obinze, unable to join her in America, goes on to live as an illegal immigrant in London. After several years they have both achieved success — Ifemelu as a popular blogger about race, and Obinze as a wealthy man in the now democratic Nigeria. When Ifemelu decides to return to Nigeria, she and Obinze must both make the biggest decision of their lives.

About the Author:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages. From the award-winning author, comes a new work 'Amaericanah' a powerful story of love, race and identity.Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, published by Algonquin in 2003, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her novel Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Broadband Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, was the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

What does “feminism” mean today? That is the question at the heart of We Should All Be Feminists, a personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from her much-viewed TEDx talk of the same name—by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. With humor and levity, here Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century—one rooted in inclusion and awareness. She shines a light not only on blatant discrimination, but also the more insidious, institutional behaviors that marginalize women around the world, in order to help readers of all walks of life better understand the often masked realities of sexual politics.

Let us learn Yoruba to learn English. Learn English to understand Yoruba and be better proficient in both languages.