DescriptionIn The Face: Cartography of the Void, acclaimed poet, novelist, and screenwriter Chris Abani has given us a brief memoir that is, in the best tradition of the genre, also an exploration of the very nature of identity. Abani meditates on his own face, beginning with his early childhood that was immersed in the Igbo culture of West Africa. The Face is a lush work of art that teems with original and profound insights into the role of race, culture, and language in fashionin...

"A stellar cast of award-winning Nigerian authors . . . a must-read for crime lovers looking for something different."— Brittle PaperIn Akashic Books's acclaimed series of original noir anthologies, each book comprises all new stories set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Now, West Africa enters the Noir Series arena, meticulously edited by one of Nigeria's best-known authors.In Lagos Noir, the stories are s...

Celebrating ten years of New-Generation African Poets, Toward a Living Archive of African Poetry presents Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani's unprecedented disquisition on the state of African poetry.TOWARD A LIVING ARCHIVE OF AFRICAN POETRY collects Kwame Dawes's and Chris Abani's introductory essays for the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Box Set Series. These essays are conversations that celebrate the work of emerging...

Chris Abani's Dog Woman is a mesmerizing, haunting, and sometimes subversive exploration of the personal and cultural politics of disempowerment and power. In these heart rousing and lyrically complex poems, the poet enacts the reconstruction of his feminized selves, and his personae struggle to re-form and transform both themselves and the difficult worlds they inhabit. At turns, earthy, enigmatic, devout, outraged, and compassionate, these elemental women's voices ring true, as ...

A breathtaking novella from the award-winning author of Song for Night and GraceLand.—A New York Times Editors' Choice"Moody, lyrical prose reminiscent of Toni Morrison's Beloved . . . Though the fictional Abigail exists only on the pages of Abani's novella, her character will seize the imagination of everyone who reads her story." — Essence Magazine" Becoming Abigail, a spare yet voluptuous tale about a ...

A startling debut volume, the latest in Chris Abani's Black Goat Poetry Series."Durbin's debut volume sizzles . . . Throughout this deeply feminist, groundbreaking collection, she employs both the elemental forces of her intellect and a vigorous intensity of startling imagery to implode or explode conventional notions of sexuality and womanhood . . . This is a book that singes the fingertips." —Maurya Simon, author of CartographiesLittle R...

This powerful collection of poems details the harrowing experiences endured by Abani and other political prisoners at the hands of Nigeria's military regime in the late 1980s.Abani vividly describes the characters that peopled this dark world, from prison inmates such as John James, tortured to death at the age of fourteen, to the general overseers. First published after his release from jail in 1991, Kalakuta Republic remains a paean to those who suffered and to the indomitable human spir...

From the National Book Award-nominated author of Dreaming in Cuban, "breathtakingly beautiful" poems about her troubled, self-destructive brother ( The Austin Chronicle)."[A] brave and moving tribute to a brother gone astray; with skill, unflinching honesty, and redemptive compassion, Cristina García tracks his marvelous, complex, and errant life…These poems are the beautiful, painful, astonishing result of a journey to hell and back in search of ...

A gritty, riveting, and wholly original murder mystery from PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author and 2015 Edgar Awards winner Chris AbaniBefore he can retire, Las Vegas detective Salazar is determined to solve a recent spate of murders. When he encounters a pair of conjoined twins with a container of blood near their car, he’s sure he has apprehended the killers, and enlists the help of Dr. Sunil Singh, a South African transplant who specializes in the study of psych...

“Abani . . . explores place and humor, exile and freedom with poems of experience and imagination . . . [he] enters the wound with a boldness that avoids nothing. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal“Stunning poems.” —New HumanistA self-described “zealot of optimism,” poet and novelist Chris Abani bravely travels into the charged intersections of atrocity and love, politics and religion, loss and renewal. In poems of devastating beauty, he investigates co...

From the author of the award-winning GraceLand comes a searing, dazzlingly written novel of a tarnished City of AngelsPraised as singular (The Philadelphia Inquirer) and extraordinary (The New York Times Book Review), GraceLand stunned critics and instantly established Chris Abani as an exciting new voice in fiction. In his second novel, set against the uncompromising landscape of East L.A., Abani follows a struggling artist ...

"A devastating portrait of a boy holding onto the shreds of his innocence during a war that deliberately, remorselessly works to yank it away."— Los Angeles TimesPart Inferno, part Paradise Lost, part Sunjata epic, Song for Night is the story of a West African boy soldier's terrifying yet oddly beautiful journey through a nightmare landscape of brutal war in search of his lost platoon. The mute protagonist—his vocal cords cut to ...