New York, My Village

"A daring first novel in the great picaresque tradition--both buoyant comedy and devastating satire--by the author of the best-selling story collection Say You're One of Them. Ekong Udousoro is a Nigerian editor undertaking a reckoning with the brutal recent history of his homeland by curating a collection of stories about the Biafran War. He is thrilled when a publishing fellowship gives him the opportunity to continue his work in Manhattan while learning the ins and outs of publishing. But while his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to the industry's colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly, boorish and hostile neighbors, and--beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism--a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food. Haunted by the devasting darkness of civil war and searingly observant about the myriad ways that tribalism defines life everywhere from the villages of Africa to the villages within New York City, New York, My Village is nevertheless full of heart, hilarity, and hope"--

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.