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Author: Vanessa Guignery Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1496851579 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 139
Book Description
Conversations with Ben Okri collects twenty-six interviews that range from 1986 to 2023 and reflect the international resonance of Nigerian writer Ben Okri's work. The reader is given access to the various phases of Okri’s life and career, beginning with his childhood (b. 1959) and upbringing in Nigeria and the publication of his early short stories and novels. The interviews also explore the tremendous success of The Famished Road (for which Okri became the first Black African writer to receive the Booker Prize in 1991) and the dazzling creativity of his subsequent work in a multiplicity of literary genres. The volume offers insight into the writer’s creative process and his unique views on literature, history, memory, politics, freedom, spirituality, and environmental issues. The conversations often veer into fascinating philosophical discussions about the nature of art and reality, the value of myth, and the dynamics of storytelling. Since the publication of his first novel in 1980, Okri has encouraged his readers to open their minds and eyes to new modes of perceiving reality. Convinced of the universality of art, he has been intent on redreaming the world from a variety of perspectives in poems, essays, short stories, novels, and plays written over a period of more than forty years. Throughout his career, Ben Okri has never stopped experimenting with new forms, creating the stoku (a mixture of short story and haiku), endowing his fictional and nonfictional creations with poetic undertones, and collaborating with visual artists, musicians, and dancers.
Author: Vanessa Guignery Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1496851579 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 139
Book Description
Conversations with Ben Okri collects twenty-six interviews that range from 1986 to 2023 and reflect the international resonance of Nigerian writer Ben Okri's work. The reader is given access to the various phases of Okri’s life and career, beginning with his childhood (b. 1959) and upbringing in Nigeria and the publication of his early short stories and novels. The interviews also explore the tremendous success of The Famished Road (for which Okri became the first Black African writer to receive the Booker Prize in 1991) and the dazzling creativity of his subsequent work in a multiplicity of literary genres. The volume offers insight into the writer’s creative process and his unique views on literature, history, memory, politics, freedom, spirituality, and environmental issues. The conversations often veer into fascinating philosophical discussions about the nature of art and reality, the value of myth, and the dynamics of storytelling. Since the publication of his first novel in 1980, Okri has encouraged his readers to open their minds and eyes to new modes of perceiving reality. Convinced of the universality of art, he has been intent on redreaming the world from a variety of perspectives in poems, essays, short stories, novels, and plays written over a period of more than forty years. Throughout his career, Ben Okri has never stopped experimenting with new forms, creating the stoku (a mixture of short story and haiku), endowing his fictional and nonfictional creations with poetic undertones, and collaborating with visual artists, musicians, and dancers.
Author: Ben Okri Publisher: National Geographic Books ISBN: 1529114918 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE ‘So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use’ The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story. Despite belonging to a spirit world made of enchantment, where there is no suffering, Azaro chooses to stay in the land of the Living: to feel it, endure it, know it and love it. This is his story. ‘In a magnificent feat of sustained imaginative writing, Okri spins a tale that is epic and intimate at the same time. The Famished Road rekindled my sense of wonder. It made me, at age 50, look at the world through the wide eyes of a child’ Michael Palin
Author: Ben Okri Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1504061225 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
Set in an African village, this follow-up to the Man Booker Prize–winning novel is “sometimes whimsical, sometimes bawdy . . . Fraught with wild visions” (The Times). “All is not well in the African village where Azaro lives. The child narrator of poet and novelist Okri’s The Famished Road, who had outwitted death in the previous book, again relates the oppressive events that continue to plague his village and his family. While political factionalization shatters the community's cohesiveness, the prodigious bar owner Madame Koto, chief exponent of the ‘Party of the Rich,’ alternately exudes portentous metaphysical malaise and miraculous erotic force. Little Azaro, himself touched and distracted by a series of animuses, follows the heels of ‘dad,’ who is a resounding vessel, by turns, of cantankerous egotism and abased self-sacrifice. This Nigerian epic reveals a violent provincial world, opaque with magical spirits which place horrendous ethical demands on fragile and fickle humanity, as if to test each individual for a thread of virtuous constancy at the core. Events drench the essentially linear narrative with all the ruthless sensuousness of a tropical storm, and Okri’s prose is lucid and deft.” —Publishers Weekly “Okri conjures up the fabulous with the same ease as he affectingly details the ways of the human spirit in a lovingly evoked African setting teeming with life—both real and mythic . . . Stunning.” —Kirkus Reviews “Once again we’re bedazzled and bedeviled by Okri’s phantasmagoric prose and the strange and wondrous sensibility of Azaro, a spirit-child living in a poor African village.” —Booklist “Both a love story and an account of the political turmoil between the parties of Rich and Poor.” —The Independent “Passages of extraordinary beauty . . . Okri paints a convincing surrealist picture.” —The Sunday Times
Author: Win McCormack Publisher: Tin House Books ISBN: 0982650787 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
In our increasingly mediated society, where joy is self-conscious and tweeted about as it is happening, is it possible for the genuinely ecstatic experience? From religious to chemically induced, from biochemical analysis to attempts to capture the ineffable, our issue on the ecstatic will feature poetry, fiction, and essays addressing the ecstatic and its counterparts ? the comedown and ecstasy thwarted, whether by internal or external means. "Tin House" is a beautifully designed periodical that features the best writers of our time alongside a new generation of talent poised to become the most important voices of the future. Content includes short stories, profiles, author interviews, poetry, essays, and unique departments such as Lost and Found, in which writers review overlooked or underrated books, and Blithe Spirits and Readable Feast, which present tales and recipes for drinks and food in a literary way.
Author: Chinua Achebe Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101595981 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart—a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil war For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.
Author: Harold Allen Drake Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199367418 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
The fourth century of our common era began and ended with a miracle: Constantine's famous Vision of the Cross at one end and Theodosius' victory bearing prayer at the other. In this book, historian H. A. Drake shows how miracles in this century forever altered the way Christians, pagans, and Jews understood themselves and each other.
Author: Ben Okri Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1504061217 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 317
Book Description
A potent combination of political, metaphorical, and mythical storytelling” from the prizewinning author of The Freedom Artist (The Scotsman). “Who can be certain where the end begins?” said Dad, shortly before he was arrested for the murder of the carpenter . . . This novel, the conclusion to the trilogy that began with the Man Booker Prize winner The Famished Road, follows the spirit-child Azaro, who travels between the worlds of the living and the dead. Set against the backdrop of a Nigerian village in turmoil, it is a novel about the multiple forms that wealth and power can take, the challenges of the physical world, and the wonders of the mystical world, by an author who has earned numerous literary honors and whose “writing is hailed for its intelligence, tenderness, poeticism and luminosity” (Financial Times). “Ben Okri is that rare thing, a literary and social visionary, a writer for whom all three—literature, culture, and vision—are profoundly interwoven.” —Ali Smith, author of Autumn
Author: Ben Okri Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa ISBN: 0143529048 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 454
Book Description
An epic of daily life, Dangerous Love is one of Ben Okri's most accessible and most disarming novels. Omovo is an office worker and artist who lives at home with his father and his father's second wife. In the communal world of the compound in which he lives, Omovo has both friends and enemies, but his most important relationship is with Ifeyiwa, a beautiful young married woman whom he loves with an almost hopeless passion – not because she doesn't return his love, but because they can never be together. Set against the backdrop of a country struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of a recent civil war, this is a story of doomed love – of star-crossed lovers, separated not by their families, but by the very circumstances of their lives.
Author: Ben Okri Publisher: Random House ISBN: 1407022555 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 432
Book Description
Starbook tells the tale of a prince and a maiden in a mythical land where a golden age is ending. Their fragile story considers the important questions we all face, exploring creativity, wisdom, suffering and transcendence in a time when imagination still ruled the world. A magnificent achievement and a modern-day parable, Starbook offers a vision of life far greater than ourselves.
Author: Vanessa Guignery
Author: Vanessa Guignery
Author: Ben Okri
Author: Ben Okri
Author: Ben Okri
Author: Win McCormack
Author: Chinua Achebe
Author: Harold Allen Drake
Author: Ben Okri
Author: Ben Okri
Author: Ben Okri