Feature Articles

An Interview with Author - Zetta Elliott

by Veronica Henry

Zetta Elliott is a poet, playwrite, educator and author. In her novel, "A Wish After Midnight", we meet a young protagonist who discovers that dreams can in fact come true.

Fifteen-year old Genna Colon believes wishes can come true. Frustrated by the drug dealers in her building, her family's cramped apartment, and her inability to compete with the cute girls at school, Genna finds comfort in her dreams of a better future. Almost every day she visits the garden and tosses coins into the fountain, wishing for a different life, a different home, and a different body. Little does she know that her wish will soon be granted: when Genna flees into the garden late one night, she makes a fateful wish and finds herself instantly transported back in time to Civil War-era Brooklyn.

What was your inspiration for "A Wish After Midnight?

When I was a child, I read and fell in love with The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I revisited that novel every few years, and when I finally read it again after graduate school, I realized I had had to erase myself in order NOT to see the obvious imperialist undertones. Decolonizing my imagination took a long time, and the legacy of those stories is complicated. I still love gardens, and I still believe they’re magical places and sites of constant transformation. But my mission as a writer is to merge who I was then (a black child growing up in an all-white community in Toronto) with where I am now. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for over ten years; I’ve taught city kids at community centers and museums, and I’ve done research on racial violence in the US. AWAM is a combination of all of those things, and a way for me to make the girl I once was (and the girls I once taught) the hero of her own adventure. Read more

Christianity Politics and Public Life in Kenya

by Paul Gifford

Since achieving independence in 1963, Kenya has existed as a classic, patronage state, ruled with an iron fist by a corrupt political elite. Kenya has also become nearly 80 percent Christian, and in this book, Paul Gifford explores the country's diverse churches and their role in shaping public and political life.

During the 1990s, Kenya's Catholic and Protestant churches challenged the state's dysfunctional one-party rule; yet today these organizations are interested more in increasing the numbers of their missionaries and enlarging their global networks than in protesting the current regime. Gifford follows this historical shift, noting the specific theology of Kenya's churches, which deeply respect African culture as a non-negotiable component of African Christianity. He also covers the rich variety of Kenya's churches and their individual efforts to preserve Kenyan cultures.

Paul Gifford is professor of African Christianity at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of African Christianity: Its Public Role and Ghana's New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalizing African Economy. Order Here

The Long Fall - Walter Mosley

Mosley leaves behind the Los Angeles setting of his Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones series (Devil in a Blue Dress, etc.) to introduce Leonid McGill, a New York City private detective, who promises to be as complex and rewarding a character as Mosley's ever produced. McGill, a 53-year-old former boxer who's still a fighter, finds out that putting his past life behind him isn't easy when someone like Tony The Suit Towers expects you to do a job; when an Albany PI hires you to track down four men known only by their youthful street names; and when your 16-year-old son, Twill, is getting in over his head with a suicidal girl. McGill shares Easy's knack for earning powerful friends by performing favors and has some of the toughness of Fearless, but he's got his own dark secrets and hard-won philosophy. New York's racial stew is different than Los Angeles's, and Mosley stirs the pot and concocts a perfect milieu for an engaging new hero and an entertaining new series.

Read the Amazon Exclusive Interview here.

Books

Say You're One of Them

by Uwem Akpan

Nigerian-born Jesuit priest 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. An Ex-mas Feast tells the heartbreaking story of eight-year-old Jigana, a Kenyan boy whose 12-year-old sister, Maisha, works as a prostitute to support her family. Jigana's mother quells the children's hunger by having them sniff glue while they wait for Maisha to earn enough to bring home a holiday meal. In Luxurious Hearses, Jubril, a teenage Muslim, flees the violence in northern Nigeria. Attacked by his own Muslim neighbors, his only way out is on a bus transporting Christians to the south. In Fattening for Gabon, 10-year-old Kotchikpa and his younger sister are sent by their sick parents to live with their uncle, Fofo Kpee, who in turn explains to the children that they are going to live with their prosperous godparents, who, as Kotchikpa pieces together, are actually human traffickers. Akpan's prose is beautiful and his stories are insightful and revealing, made even more harrowing because all the horror—and there is much—is seen through the eyes of children.

Drown

by Junot Diaz

The 10 tales in this intense debut collection plunge us into the emotional lives of people redefining their American identity. Narrated by adolescent Dominican males living in the struggling communities of the Dominican Republic, New York and New Jersey, these stories chronicle their outwardly cool but inwardly anguished attempts to recreate themselves in the midst of eroding family structures and their own burgeoning sexuality. The best pieces, such as "Aguantando" (to endure), "Negocios," "Edison, NJ" and the title story, portray young people waiting for transformation, waiting to belong. Their worlds generally consist of absent fathers, silent mothers and friends of questionable principles and morals. Diaz's restrained prose reveals their hopes only by implication. It's a style suited to these characters, who long for love but display little affection toward each other. Still, the author's compassion glides just below the surface, occasionally emerging in poetic passages of controlled lyricism, lending these stories a lasting resonance.

Unburnable

by Marie-elena John

John takes readers into Caribbean culture and contemporary black America to explore family and oppression in this affecting but flawed debut novel. Lillian, a 30-something native of Dominica, now an activist in Washington, D.C., suffered a breakdown at 14 after discovering the identity of her birth mother, Iris: the beautiful, insane village prostitute whose own mother, the famous healer Matilda, was convicted of multiple murder and hung. Sent to live with her aunt in New York, Lillian grows up shielded from her history, avoiding troubling questions about herself and keeping friends distant. Her only real friend is Teddy Morgan, a self-absorbed historian she's pined after since their college days. Twenty years after leaving Dominica, Lillian is determined to return, in hopes of learning what happened to her mother, grandmother and herself—and she's determined to bring Teddy with her. John switches between Lillian's present day and the mid-century lives of Matilda and Iris, who are warm, vibrant characters and a welcome contrast to Lillian's gloom-and-doom. Aloof from the outset, it's never clear why, after 20 years without contact, Lillian wants to investigate her past, and her calculated manipulation of Teddy makes her hard to feel for. However, strong writing and interesting supporting characters should keep readers occupied through the end.

Edwidge Danticat - 2009 MacArthur Fellow