After receiving nearly 1,400 submissions from across Africa, South African studio Triggerfish chose 8 projects for further development.
The post Triggerfish’s Story Lab Announces 8 African Winners appeared first on Cartoon Brew.
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By: Jerry Beck,
on 12/16/2015
Blog: Cartoon Brew (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Anthony Silverston, Afrofuturism, Bru and Boegie, Dropped, Ian Tucker, Kay Carmichael, KC’s Super 4, Kelly Dillon, Lucy Heavens, Malenga Mulendema, Ninja Princess, Pumzi, Wormholes, Supa Strikas, The Camel Racer, The Wild Waste, Triggerfish Studios, Wanuri Kahiu, TV, Africa, Kenya, Disney, Feature Film, Nigeria, Lights, Mike Scott, Nnedi Okorafor, South Africa, Zambia, Add a tag
By: Maryann Yin,
on 11/12/2015
Blog: Galley Cat (Mediabistro) (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Authors, Tad Hills, Stan Lee, Nnedi Okorafor, Paulo Coehlo, Add a tag
By: Karen Strong,
on 11/11/2015
Blog: Musings of a Novelista (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: The Book of Phoenix, Books, Nnedi Okorafor, Add a tag
By: Maryann Yin,
on 12/11/2014
Blog: Galley Cat (Mediabistro) (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Libba Bray, Events, David Levithan, Sherman Alexie, Jacqueline Woodson, Nnedi Okorafor, Joe Monti, Meg Medina, Ken Liu, Kameron Hurley, Daniel Jose Older, Add a tag
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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 6/29/2012
Blog: The Mumpsimus (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: science fiction, Announcements, Readercon, Joanna Russ, Nnedi Okorafor, colonialism, Tutuola, John Rieder, Add a tag
I will be at Readercon 23 in a few weeks. It's the one convention I attend every year, and I'm especially excited about this year because the panels are especially interesting, the guest list is awesome, and one of the guests of honor is Peter Straub, whose work I am in awe of and who is among the most delightful people to hear on panels or in interviews or readings or, really, anywhere. (Honestly, if Peter Straub were a train conductor, I'd follow him from car to car. He'd get freaked out and call the police, and I'd get arrested for being a weirdo, but it would be so worth it!) Also, we get to celebrate 50 years of Samuel Delany's work. And we give out the Shirley Jackson Awards!
Before posting my schedule, I wanted to note the Readercon Book Club selections for this year. These are panel discussions of specific books, a "classic" and a recent work of fiction and nonfiction each. This year's are:
By: Jason Boog,
on 10/31/2011
Blog: Galley Cat (Mediabistro) (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Awards, Elizabeth Hand, Kate Bernheimer, Jeff Vandermeer, Joyce Carol Oates, Nnedi Okorafor, Marc Gascoigne, Alisa Krasnostein, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Karen Joy Fowler, Kinuko Y. Craft, Add a tag
By: Matthew Cheney,
on 8/26/2010
Blog: The Mumpsimus (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Nnedi Okorafor, Sandman Meditations, Linkdump, Cheney publications, Add a tag
By: Matthew Cheney,
on 6/21/2010
Blog: The Mumpsimus (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Cheney publications, narrative, Strange Horizons, reviewers, Nnedi Okorafor, Add a tag
By: Matthew Cheney,
on 6/2/2010
Blog: The Mumpsimus (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: reality, Nnedi Okorafor, books, reviews, Africa, fantasy, narrative, M. John Harrison, Add a tag
I just finished writing a long review for Rain Taxi of Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, and it's one of those rare books that I just want to recommend to everybody. It's going to the top of my list of really good science fiction/fantasy novels that can be safely given to people who think they don't like SF, but it's also a book that can be appreciated both by people who merely want to read an engaging story and people who want more than just a good story.
I had so much fun writing a review of Who Fears Death because it is, among other things, very much a book about textuality and storytelling -- about how the stories we tell, the words we use, the structures and vantage points we select, affect our perception of the world. I kept thinking of some of M. John Harrison's books and the way they throw our readerly expectations and habits back in our face. Some of the pleasure, though, in reading Harrison is masochistic ("Yes, master, flog me again for my desire for fantasy!"), but the effect of Who Fears Death is very different, despite the many horrific events experienced or observed by the characters, because its view of fantasy is more generous -- the world is, it seems to say, made up of stories. They're how we understand things. So be careful in the stories you tell and the stories you listen to, but don't give up on myth and legend and fantasy. (In that, it's more Barry Lopez than M. John Harrison, really.)
Though the review I just sent off is 1,500 words, I felt like I could have gone on at twice that length, and I fear what I wrote is too general. I didn't even find a way to write about the epigraph from Patrice Lumumba that opens the book ("Dear friends, are you afraid of death?") -- one of the fascinating things about the novel is how it uses fantasy in a kind of dialogic approach to reality, thus illuminating both. For instance, part of the story uses a quest structure with echoes of Lord of the Rings (including a giant eye of evil) to critique both the good/evil dichotomy of so much epic fantasy and the good/evil thinking that fuels massacres and genocide in our own world. The stories we tell ourselves are not innocent -- they affect how we behave toward each other, and Who Fears Death shows that vividly. It's also about other types of fantasy -- for instance, the common one that the Harry Potter books so effectively exploited wherein nerdy or awkward folks become the saviors of the universe. Typically, once they've saved the universe, those characters go on to have great lives in the epilogues of their books. It doesn't really give too much away to say that Who Fears Death is smarter than that about what heroism and fate can demand, while also recognizing that stories, to be useful, may need to answer some of the ambiguities more common to life than fiction. Just because there are lots of lies in legends and myths doesn't mean we don't need them or that they don't tell truths about life; we just need to be careful in how and why we choose to keep telling them.
The method of the novel's telling will probably not obsess ordinary readers the way it did me, because I'm always obsessed with the 1 Comments on In Which I Exhort You to Read Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, last added: 6/3/2010
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By: Jerry Beck,
on 12/16/2015
Blog: Cartoon Brew (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Anthony Silverston, Afrofuturism, Bru and Boegie, Dropped, Ian Tucker, Kay Carmichael, KC’s Super 4, Kelly Dillon, Lucy Heavens, Malenga Mulendema, Ninja Princess, Pumzi, Wormholes, Supa Strikas, The Camel Racer, The Wild Waste, Triggerfish Studios, Wanuri Kahiu, TV, Africa, Kenya, Disney, Feature Film, Nigeria, Lights, Mike Scott, Nnedi Okorafor, South Africa, Zambia, Add a tag
By: Maryann Yin,
on 11/12/2015
Blog: Galley Cat (Mediabistro) (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Authors, Tad Hills, Stan Lee, Nnedi Okorafor, Paulo Coehlo, Add a tag
Beloved author Paulo Coelho has donated three of his books to the Worldreader’s digital library. The nonprofit organization behind this venture allows young students and public library patrons in sub-Saharan Africa to access e-books through e-readers.
Access is also granted to bibliophiles throughout Africa who read using a mobile phone. This digital library currently features 28,500 local and international titles.
Here’s more from the press release: “The titles donated are The Supreme Gift, an adaptation of Henry Drummond’s famous sermon on love written to appeal to all faiths; Christmas Stories a collection of ten Christmas tales accompanied by Paulo’s ruminations on a life well lived; and Stories for Parents, Children, and Grandchildren, a collection of timeless and magical tales from around the world retold by Paulo and illustrated by his wife, Christina Oiticica…Worldreader currently works with over 250 authors from around the world including Stan Lee, Tad Hills, Nnedi Okorafor, and publishers including Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster and Longhorn Publishers (Kenya).”
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By: Karen Strong,
on 11/11/2015
Blog: Musings of a Novelista (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: The Book of Phoenix, Books, Nnedi Okorafor, Add a tag
This post is part of a series on the blog where I share some of the nuggets of wisdom and inspiration — related to writing and/or life — that I find steeped in the pages of novels that I’ve read.
This year I’ve been reading a lot of books from sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor.
Her world-building is amazing and I’ve enjoyed reading about her characters and the choices that they have to make. I also enjoyed the feminist bent of her heroines as well.
From Phoenix, the POV protagonist of the novel The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
I love books. I adore everything about them. I love the feel of the pages on my fingertips. They are light enough to carry, yet so heavy with worlds and ideas. I love the sound of the pages flicking against my fingers. Print against fingerprints.
0 Comments on Novel Wisdom (30) as of 1/1/1900
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By: Maryann Yin,
on 12/11/2014
Blog: Galley Cat (Mediabistro) (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Libba Bray, Events, David Levithan, Sherman Alexie, Jacqueline Woodson, Nnedi Okorafor, Joe Monti, Meg Medina, Ken Liu, Kameron Hurley, Daniel Jose Older, Add a tag
ReedPOP and We Need Diverse Books have established a partnership. The collaborators plan to organize two panels that will take place during BookCon 2015.
The first panel, scheduled for May 30th, will focus on the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre with participation from Kameron Hurley, Ken Liu, Nnedi Okorafor, Daniel Jose Older, and Joe Monti. The second panel, scheduled for May 31st, will feature appearances from Jacqueline Woodson, Sherman Alexie, Libba Bray, David Levithan, and Meg Medina.
Here’s more from the press release: “We Need Diverse Books was part of last year’s inaugural BookCon playing host to a standing room only panel full of thought-provoking conversation and enthusiastic readers. The overwhelming response from fans and the rapid ascent of We Need Diverse Books, which grew from a social media awareness campaign into a global movement, set the stage for the partnership to expand at this year’s show.”
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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 6/29/2012
Blog: The Mumpsimus (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: science fiction, Announcements, Readercon, Joanna Russ, Nnedi Okorafor, colonialism, Tutuola, John Rieder, Add a tag
I will be at Readercon 23 in a few weeks. It's the one convention I attend every year, and I'm especially excited about this year because the panels are especially interesting, the guest list is awesome, and one of the guests of honor is Peter Straub, whose work I am in awe of and who is among the most delightful people to hear on panels or in interviews or readings or, really, anywhere. (Honestly, if Peter Straub were a train conductor, I'd follow him from car to car. He'd get freaked out and call the police, and I'd get arrested for being a weirdo, but it would be so worth it!) Also, we get to celebrate 50 years of Samuel Delany's work. And we give out the Shirley Jackson Awards!
Before posting my schedule, I wanted to note the Readercon Book Club selections for this year. These are panel discussions of specific books, a "classic" and a recent work of fiction and nonfiction each. This year's are:
Readercon Classic Fiction Book Club: The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Michael Cisco, Sarah Smith, John H. Stevens, Michael Swanwick (leader), Jeff VanderMeer. The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a classic of world literature, a vivid, exhilarating, and linguistically breathtaking tale of a fantastic quest. The novel is based on Yoruba folktales, but Amos Tutuola makes them uniquely his own. In a 1997 obituary for Tutuola in The Independent, Alastair Niven wrote: "Tutuola was a born story-teller, taking traditional oral material and re-imagining it inimitably. In this way he was, though very different in method and craft, the Grimm or Perrault of Nigerian story-telling, refashioning old tales in a unique way which made them speak across cultures." Now, 60 years after it was first released, The Palm-Wine Drinkard stands as the best sort of classic: one that remains a pleasure to read, but that opens up new readings with each encounter.
Readercon Recent Fiction Book Club: Who Fears Deat1 Comments on Readercon 23 Schedule, last added: 6/30/2012Display Comments Add a Comment
By: Jason Boog,
on 10/31/2011
Blog: Galley Cat (Mediabistro) (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Awards, Elizabeth Hand, Kate Bernheimer, Jeff Vandermeer, Joyce Carol Oates, Nnedi Okorafor, Marc Gascoigne, Alisa Krasnostein, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Karen Joy Fowler, Kinuko Y. Craft, Add a tag
Novelist Nnedi Okorafor has won the World Fantasy Award for her novel, Who Fears Death.
Author Jeff VanderMeer described the book: “[The novel] is a powerful combination of science fiction, fantasy, African folklore, and stark realism. It tells the story of Onyesonwu, a woman of extraordinary powers in a post-apocalyptic West Africa, a world of perils and mysteries, of lost technologies and brutal wars. Onyesonwu’s name means “Who fears death?”, and her birth is the result of rape used as a weapon in battle; this legacy affects the woman she becomes, and the novel portrays her education as a sorceress and her quest to bring order and peace to her life and world.”
The announcement was made at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego. We’ve included the other award winners below…
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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 8/26/2010
Blog: The Mumpsimus (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Nnedi Okorafor, Sandman Meditations, Linkdump, Cheney publications, Add a tag
The end of summer continues to be busy for me (in good ways), and I've neglected a few things I should have linked to. Actually, I've probably neglected many things I should have linked to. For now, though, just a few...
I'm continuing to explore Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics over at Gestalt Mash, one issue each week. Last week was issue 5, "Passengers"; this week issue 6, "24 Hours".
And for Amazon.com's Omnivoracious blog, I interviewed Nnedi Okorafor, author of the wonderful novel Who Fears Death. (And Nnedi has just been interviewed over at Tor.com, too.)
Finally, my favorite internet item this week: a film called "Words", presented as an extra feature to a Radiolab program.
0 Comments on Catching Up as of 1/1/1900
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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 6/21/2010
Blog: The Mumpsimus (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Cheney publications, narrative, Strange Horizons, reviewers, Nnedi Okorafor, Add a tag
My latest Strange Horizons column has just been posted, and it's a sort of meditation on four books: Reality Hunger by David Shields, Narrative Power edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, and Vanishing Point by Ander Monson.
All four books are well worth reading, thinking about, arguing with. I especially hope that in the wake of Paul Di Filippo's review of Who Fears Death in the B&N Review that the column will offer an alternative way of evaluating the novel. For the way Di Filippo read the book, I think his assessment is valid, but he read it in the most narrow and silly way possible, the way someone who's only ever read science fiction would read. And I know he hasn't only read science fiction, so I'm perplexed at the assumptions he applies. I agree with his desire for fewer savior of the world/universe/everything characters, and in fact once wrote another SH column about it, but I think there's abundant evidence in the text that Okorafor is a smart writer who is as aware of this paradigm as anybody else, and is both using and critiquing it in complex, multi-layered ways, just as she is simultaneously using and critiquing other tropes, tendencies, templates -- not all of them from SF -- throughout the novel.
6 Comments on Reality Narrative Death Point, last added: 6/21/2010
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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 6/2/2010
Blog: The Mumpsimus (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: reality, Nnedi Okorafor, books, reviews, Africa, fantasy, narrative, M. John Harrison, Add a tag
I just finished writing a long review for Rain Taxi of Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, and it's one of those rare books that I just want to recommend to everybody. It's going to the top of my list of really good science fiction/fantasy novels that can be safely given to people who think they don't like SF, but it's also a book that can be appreciated both by people who merely want to read an engaging story and people who want more than just a good story.
I had so much fun writing a review of Who Fears Death because it is, among other things, very much a book about textuality and storytelling -- about how the stories we tell, the words we use, the structures and vantage points we select, affect our perception of the world. I kept thinking of some of M. John Harrison's books and the way they throw our readerly expectations and habits back in our face. Some of the pleasure, though, in reading Harrison is masochistic ("Yes, master, flog me again for my desire for fantasy!"), but the effect of Who Fears Death is very different, despite the many horrific events experienced or observed by the characters, because its view of fantasy is more generous -- the world is, it seems to say, made up of stories. They're how we understand things. So be careful in the stories you tell and the stories you listen to, but don't give up on myth and legend and fantasy. (In that, it's more Barry Lopez than M. John Harrison, really.)
Though the review I just sent off is 1,500 words, I felt like I could have gone on at twice that length, and I fear what I wrote is too general. I didn't even find a way to write about the epigraph from Patrice Lumumba that opens the book ("Dear friends, are you afraid of death?") -- one of the fascinating things about the novel is how it uses fantasy in a kind of dialogic approach to reality, thus illuminating both. For instance, part of the story uses a quest structure with echoes of Lord of the Rings (including a giant eye of evil) to critique both the good/evil dichotomy of so much epic fantasy and the good/evil thinking that fuels massacres and genocide in our own world. The stories we tell ourselves are not innocent -- they affect how we behave toward each other, and Who Fears Death shows that vividly. It's also about other types of fantasy -- for instance, the common one that the Harry Potter books so effectively exploited wherein nerdy or awkward folks become the saviors of the universe. Typically, once they've saved the universe, those characters go on to have great lives in the epilogues of their books. It doesn't really give too much away to say that Who Fears Death is smarter than that about what heroism and fate can demand, while also recognizing that stories, to be useful, may need to answer some of the ambiguities more common to life than fiction. Just because there are lots of lies in legends and myths doesn't mean we don't need them or that they don't tell truths about life; we just need to be careful in how and why we choose to keep telling them.
The method of the novel's telling will probably not obsess ordinary readers the way it did me, because I'm always obsessed with the 1 Comments on In Which I Exhort You to Read Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, last added: 6/3/2010
By: Carol Brendler,
on 1/11/2010
Blog: JACKET KNACK (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, Nnedi Okorafor, Interviews, middle grade, Justine Larbalestier, Race, cheryl klein, Liar, Silhouettes, Add a tag
Blog: JACKET KNACK (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, Nnedi Okorafor, Interviews, middle grade, Justine Larbalestier, Race, cheryl klein, Liar, Silhouettes, Add a tag
Recently, the Brown Bookshelf blogged about their own Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich and her first novel which just came out this month, Eighth Grade Superzero (Scholastic, 2010) and guess what. The cover has a superhero silhouette on it.
It's cool and kid-friendly, don't you agree? I like the way the sun's been used, as if it's adding more energy to the figure in the foreground. And the sneakers hint at the humor therein.
Not long ago, Julie talked about silhouette images on covers, and a while before that we had some discussion here and here about the notion that publishers might be hesitant to choose a jacket image showing a person of color, the suspicion being that it would hurt sales somehow. So it seemed natural to find out more about this one.
I sent a quick note to Olugbemisola (Gbemi, to her friends) Rhuday-Perkovich, who seems utterly charming by the way, and this is how she replied:
OR-P on what she likes best about the cover:
"I love the way that it evokes the MC's sense of strength or superpower in the ordinary world. And the colours! Just perfect."OR-P on the story behind the design:
"The designer's name is Christopher Stengel, and my editor wrote a bit about the design process on her blog (her words about my cover are in the comments section)."The editor is Cheryl Klein, who also worked on Francisco X. Stork's Marcelo in the Real World. In the comments section of her post, someone asked about the silhouette, and in Ms. Klein's reply we get a little insight into what kind of thought goes into a novel's cover. Some highlights:
"For SUPERZERO, we went with a French design team called LaFrench: www.lafrench.org.. . ."
". . . At no point did we tell the artist "Don't put a picture of a black kid on the cover (and you can see they've used lots of POC in their past work) . . ."Her post brought to light two new things for me:
- A publisher's search for the perfect cover can mean going overseas for just the right look.
- Scholastic has produced quite a few jacket covers that feature an image of a POC (Person of Color). I hadn't realized.
2 Comments on Debut Novelist: Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich's First Cover, last added: 1/11/2010
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Nice post thanks for submit it here.