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This is a wonderfully strange book, and probably the most obvious reason for its strangeness is the confluence of genres it enacts. Ghosh’s book gives his readers both the findings of many years of research, and the story of his undertaking that research.
more...The blurb for Kati Kati runs “A young woman with no memory of her life or death, is helped with assimilation to the afterlife by a ghost.” So far, so weird. This Kenyan film delivers on this promise of weirdness in a wonderfully compelling and understated way.
more...Between the world and me is a letter from a father to his son about living in the United States of America in a Black man’s body. There are moments in this book where the beauty of Coates’ prose is quite breath-taking, and the whole is sustained by an intellectual rigour that allows it to shine all the better
more...The Promise marks the third time a South African writer has won the Booker: Galgut joins fellow laureates Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee. The book is executed with a real skill for the craft of writing, and commands respect for the author’s handling of his medium.
more...The Bone People, set on the South Island of New Zealand, is not always easy, but it’s absolutely worth the trouble. Over the course of reading it my relationship to it kept changing: from liking it, to hating it, to loving it; from wanting to redeem the characters, to loathing them, to taking them for what they were.
more...Friday Black is the acclaimed first collection of short stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. He has a knack for locating the horror already existing in the everyday and drawing it to chilling yet strangely logical conclusions.
more...After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, a debate emerged amongst scholars about whether postcolonial studies could provide appropriate tools of analysis for post-socialist or post-Soviet situations and experiences. People voiced different views on the so-called applicability of postcolonial theory and status in the post-Soviet zone.
more...The Humboldt Forum in Berlin has been a controversial point of discussion for what seems like forever. The debate about this addition to the urban and cultural landscape of Berlin has revolved around a number of issues, including the history of the site, the cost of the project, and not least the objects to be exhibited there. It is this last point that is of particular interest to us at poco.lit., since the Forum is set to be the new home for Berlin’s ‘non-European’ collections.
more...Breaking with the much-needed, but often painful plunges into US history of the author’s previous novels, the portrayal of the Harlem Shuffle, and the reading experience as a whole are – as intended by the author – predominantly light-hearted and entertaining. It is a heist novel set in 1960s Harlem.
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