Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan

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(Hardcover)

Average Customer Rating: Customer Rating for this product is 5 out of 5 (1 ratings)

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  • Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
  • Pub. Date: June 2008
  • ISBN-13: 9780316113786
  • Sales Rank: 1,950
  • 368pp
 
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Synopsis

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, renderinglives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

…[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. In each of the tales in Say You're One of Them a protagonist's childlike innocence is ultimately savaged by the facts of African life.

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Biography

Uwem Akpan was born in a village in Nigeria and currently teaches in Zimbabwe. After studying philosophy and English at Creighton and Gonzaga universities, he studied theology for three years at the Catholic University of East Africa. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003 and received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. "My Parents' Bedroom," a story included in this, his first collection, was one of five short stories by African writers chosen as finalists for The Caine Prize for African Writing.

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Number of Reviews: 1
Average Rating: Customer Rating for this product is 5 out of 5
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Customer Rating for this product is 5 out of 5 A reviewer
CMcN, A reviewer, 07/08/2008

'Fiction that gives the children of Africa a voice' is what this book is called. These are voices that are difficult to listen to from our sheltered lives. This book is for anyone who ever said, 'Why didn't I ever hear about this?, when an injustice is publicized.

Also recommended: Those who have read 'Left To Tell' by Immaculee Ilibagiza will appreciate the realism of the short story 'My Parent's Bedroom.'