Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie's Aya de Yopougon Trans. Helge Dascher Gallimard, 2005 978-2-07-057311-7 (Available as Aya in English) Over the past summer, I was exploring library branches that I had never visited before and it was at one of those that I made Aya’s acquaintance.This new bookish territory not only took
As a child, I didn't enjoy the Ananse stories. I did read a lot of fairy tales and stories about enchantment;I liked the Uncle Remus stories, and I loved the Mouse Woman stories (anyone else in the Mouse Woman fan club?), but Ananse didn't do it for me. That may
November is the perfect time to re-read old favourites, so when Olduvai reminded me that Jean Webster's novel would fit perfectly into my epistolary Fridays, it wasn't long before I was re-reading. I first read this book the summer that I was eleven, the first summer in which I was
Adam Gopnik begins his second lecture on winter (first, here) by asking whether we remember that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein plays out in the northern, Arctic reaches. I didn't remember that: did you? Nonetheless, I don't have any trouble conjuring up the images that he describes in opening his
In the process of looking for works by Ama Ata Aidoo with Kinna's Ghanaian Literature Week in mind, I came across this collection African Love Stories. I requested it from the library and hoped that it would include one of Ama Ata Aidoo's stories, and actually it does not, but her
