Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Half of a Yellow Sun (which is still in the now-winnowed running for the rooster) is in this week's Week and lists her favorite contemporary short-story collections and provides brief commentary:
- Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones - "His sentences have a sort of lovely rolling-along quality, and the stories make you think he got the place and people right even if you've never been there."
- Girls at War by Chinua Achebe - "The emotional power of these stories accumulates unobtrusively; there are sentences in them that will always move me to tears."
- Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri - "I love the precise beauty of Lahiri's language, her light touch, the believability of her characters and details."
- No Sweetness Here by Ama Ata Aidoo - "The voice is effectively 'oral' and reflects Aidoo's interest in the idea of community. She deals with big issues with such sly wit."
- Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson - "I loved how difficult it is to forget the characters and their strangeness and loneliness, and how the stories retain their dark humor."
- Can We Talk by Shimmer Chinodya - "I love how keenly he portrays the ways in which people lose faith in the large and small things, and how he suggests, without ever beating the reader over the head, that the disappointments in his characters' lives shadow the larger disappointments of post-independence Zimbabwe."
I love it when an author I admire leads me to other authors I've not yet read. Guess I'll be adding the Aidoo and Chinodya short story collections to the ever-growing pile...
