New Read 1

I last bought Harper's Bazaar (or was it Harpers & Queen?) when Salman Rushdie wed Padma Lakshmi in New York and the pictures (featuring writer-wedding goers including Zadie Smith & Kathy Lette) were splashed on the pages of the magazine. Golden couple now blissfully divorced... I bought the magazine again this month, the June issue, after I read on Petina Gappah's blog about a story in there contributed by Orange Prize winner -
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(talking of the Orange, how the prize went totally drain-ward this year, with the wholly misguided choice of that embarrassment of a celebrity who's always falling drunk out of clubs, changing clothes on the streets and being pictured with strange stuff seemingly up her nose - as a judge! I'm talking of Lily Allen, who people actually thought was cool. Once. The choice of Allen as judge raised not a few eyebrows - including Maggie Gee's - and apologists used up all their choice words defending the selection. Lily Allen left the Orange with peels only, when she 'dropped out' of the judging panel. Soon after, we learned she'd actually been dropped by the organisation after failing to turn up at judges' panel meetings. She helped 'select' the longlist, apparently - by phone. She more than proved the point some made all along, that she had no place on a literary award judging panel. Ms Allen has gone even more erratic since, only a few shades better than Amy Winehouse. Pity. It shouldn't happen to an Orange Prize judge. Or, it shouldn't have happened to the Orange Prize).
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- anyhow, about what we were speaking... I read on Petina Gappah's blog that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a new short story in the current issue of Harper's Bazaar, so I went and got me a copy. Amarachi is the story, about a young Nigerian woman who comes back home from America for her wedding, all changed (to her mother Mrs Njoku's consternation), and with a Kenyan fiance in tow.

Since 'Amarachi' is all of one page, I don't suppose Harper's will thank me for reproducing the page visually here, but here's an excerpt we typed up earlier:
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"They were on their second cups when Sochienne said she wanted to have her wedding at Amarachi, the village house where she had spent her childhood holidays; she preferred a venue of emotional significance to an overpriced gilded hall. Mrs Njoku choked on her tea. The hall was already paid for but, more important, Amarachi was old, the grounds sloped, this was the rainy season and the mud would ruin women's shoes and nobody would take a wedding seriously if it was held in that backwater. Indeed, nobody would come."
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Not quite what Mrs Njoku planned for her daughter's wedding. The short-short story is illustrated with images posed by the author herself. It seems she channelled the mother in one image, and the daughter in another. Wordsbody's preferred image is reproduced here. Those wanting to read what happens with the wedding at Amarachi, are to seek out Harper's Bazaar.

Vanessa Gebbie's Book Launch

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Vanessa Gebbie, winner of the 2nd Annual Per Contra Prize (2008) and other writing awards too numerous to mention here just now, launched her short story collection, Words from a Glass Bubble at the Foundling Museum, London, on Tuesday March 11. It was my first time at the Foundling Museum, which started life in the 18th Century as a hospital for abandoned children. Its historic surroundings with priceless works of art was a fitting setting for the launch of a book by the author, who herself was given up for adoption at birth. The book is dedicated to the memory of a late friend, Jan Newton, who was also an adopted child. Newton’s husband was in the gathering at the Foundling Museum. As was Maggie Gee, whose blurb has pride of place on the front cover of Words from a Glass Bubble, above the image of the charmed girl hopping gaily down a bending road.

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Also there on the night was London-based Elaine Chiew who was a finalist of the Per Contra Prize this year. Vanessa Gebbie, Elaine and I – along with several other international writers – are participants in a collaborative fiction project across borders presently. But it was Vanessa’s night, and Elaine and I jostled discreetly and atimes not so discreetly with the literary crowd all night to get our own words in with the author; and to get our copies of the book autographed.

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Wine flowed with conversation but all fell silent when Gebbie got on a square podium in one end of the grand room to read from her book. An attentive, standing audience formed a crescent around her as she read the title story (a multiple award winner) , read all

the way through in 2 sessions.

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I left the museum after this first time knowing I’ll be revisiting sometime soon. On the tube home I forgot my current reading and dipped into Words from a Glass Bubble instead. The shortish Yellow Birds, Beaks Open, narrated by the friend of a drug addict, was finished before I emerged on the other end. And the bedside reading later that night, was the title story read by the author earlier.

Words from a Glass Bubble is published by Salt. Vanessa Gebbie is the judge of the 2008 Fish One-Page Story Prize. Visit her blog.

Wasafiri Reading

Biyi Bandele...

the long

and the short

of it

Seeing a shaven headed Biyi Bandele at Wasafiri’s reading event of 22 November wasn’t all that shocking, as I’d run into him days before, on the 17th, at an Imperial War Museum event about African Soldiers who fought in the World Wars. One has gotten used to Bandele with flowing dreadlocks and seeing him without, takes some getting used to. The author doesn’t know what the fuss is about. He grew the locks while writing his last book, Burma Boy, and now that it’s finished... (a new book in the works? Hmn...)

Wasafiri Magazine launched its 52nd edition with an evening of readings and wine, and the venue was Foyles Bookshop on Charing Cross Road, London. The Magazine asked: “Why do some books make a particular impact on our reading and writing lives? In what ways do they return to us? When, why and how did we first encounter them?” These are the questions posed in the new issue, in which writers and publishers talk about the book that made them. Chaired by Robert Fraser, readers on the night grappled with the same questions after reading from the books that ‘made’ them.

The readers were Maggie Gee (who on learning that Lily Allen is to be a judge of the 2008 Orange Prize, has asked: “Where is the seriousness here?”); Rana Das Gupta (whose talk centred around the fact that he actually doesn’t read novels, though of course he writes them!); Biyi Bandele and Pauline Melville (author of The Ventriloquist’s Tale). Melville started her reading with the line that lured her into writing, the opening of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I patted myself on the back for recognising it, even before Melville reveal the book and author from whence it was taken.

In the audience: Linton Kwesi-Johnson, Bernadine Evaristo and many more.

Images © MW