New Releases by Uwem Akpan

Exuberant storytelling full of wry comedy, dark history, and devastating satire—by the celebrated and original author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Say You're One of Them. From a suspiciously cheap Hell's Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship Ekong Udousoro is about to begin the opportunity of a lifetime: to learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent epicenter. While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly—callous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile neighbors, and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food. Reckoning, at the same time, with the recent history of the devastating and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekong's people were a minority of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes, Ekong's life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife. The great apartment deal wrangled by his editor turns out to be an illegal sublet crawling with bedbugs. The lights of Times Square slide off the hardened veneer of New Yorkers plowing past the tourists. A collective antagonism toward the "other" consumes Ekong's daily life. Yet in overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, Chinese and Latino and African American, and in bonding with his true allies at work and advocating for healing back home, Ekong proves that there is still hope in sharing our stories. Akpan's prose melds humor, tenderness, and pain to explore the myriad ways that tribalisms define life everywhere, from the villages of Nigeria to the villages within New York City. New York, My Village is a triumph of storytelling and a testament to the life-sustaining power of community across borders and across boroughs.

Cinq histoires en forme d'hommage à la sagesse des enfants, à leur résilience face aux circonstances les plus terribles. Une famille vivant dans un bidonville de Nairobi s'affère pour trouver des cadeaux à l'approche de Noël. Une jeune fille rwandaise raconte le combat de ses parents pour maintenir les apparences de la normalité, alors que plane, grandissante, la menace du génocide. Au Gabon, Kotchikpa, 10 ans, et sa petite soeur sont laissés à la garde de leur oncle Fofo, qui tente de les vendre comme esclaves. Deux amies d'enfance sont les otages d'un conflit religieux en Ethiopie. A bord d'un bus rempli de réfugiés - microcosme de l'Afrique d'aujourd'hui -, un garçon musulman compte sur sa foi pour réussir une dangereuse traversée du Nigéria.

Chinese edition of Say Youre One of Them. This collection of five short stories out of Africa told by Akpan, a Nigerian-born Jesuit priest, although some are over 100 pages, transcends everything we in America know as extreme poverty, violence and broken families. This is an Oprah Book Club selection. In Traditional Chinese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

An Oprah's Book Club selection: this "electrifying" book ( Washington Post) pays tribute to the wisdom and resilience of children even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances. Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few readers will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord. In the second of his stories published in a New Yorker special fiction issue, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa. Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent. One of the best books of the year: Wall Street Journal, People , Bloomberg News, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post Book World, and Entertainment Weekly