What to Read When You’re a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize Winner
The 2018 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize winners share books that have inspired them!
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Posts Tagged: What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Renee Simms
Renee Simms discusses her debut collection, Meet Behind Mars, leaving law to become a writer, and writing through major life changes.
...moreBorn of a Limitless Imagination
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ilana Teitelbaum writes a glowing review of Helen Oyeyemi’s short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, praising Oyeyemi’s singular voice. Teitelbaum writes: “The dazzle of Oyeyemi’s technique fully engages the reader’s mind; the heart is undisturbed. … Oyeyemi’s infinitely nested stories seem an end […]
...moreRooted Elsewhere
Most of the rest of the stories in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours are linked, with major characters in one story later turning up as minor characters in another. This loose, multiracial, polymorphously perverse, generation-spanning cast lives mostly in present-day England, but they have roots elsewhere. Anton grew up in “a country that’s not even sure […]
...moreOyeyemi’s Luminous Universe
Author Laura van den Berg has glowing words about Helen Oyeyemi’s short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. In her New York Times book review, van den Berg writes: “A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem… Oyeyemi has created a universe that dazzles and […]
...moreAll About Eva
She’s black, but not local, this new colleague who wears her boots and jeans and scarf with a bohemian aplomb that causes the others to ask her where she shops. “Oh, you know, thrift stores,” she says with a chuckle. George at the desk next to yours says “Charity shops?” and the newcomer says “Yeah, […]
...moreA Crucial Conversation with the Self
For a black woman in a white world, a conversation with the self is crucial: for when she walks through that often-unwelcoming world she is subjected to confining perceptions of who she might be. When that world insists on racist and narrow paradigms, the diary gives these women a chance to scratch out and rewrite […]
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