Crazyfinger

Uwem Akpan

Books centered on experiences of children in troubled times should never be analyzed and bandied about too much, because there's too much of "me me me...look how much I can see..."-ness in any analysis and criticism.  Anyway this to-be-released book, Say You're One of Them, by Uwem Akpan looks like an achievement already. 

More by Uwem Akpan in the The New Yorker magazine:

• Short story An Ex-mas Feast
• Short story My Parents' Bedroom
• Author interview Between Two Continents

These stories are a significant achievement because, among other things, the craft of writing the author got it right.  Because if you don't, then you are conveying inaccurate experiences, inaccurate re-collections.  That inaccuracy would be a world away from the truth, however dangerously all-encompassing that term "truth" is. 

Tagore and Noguchi

"The cripple, shorn of his power to strike, may collapse, but to ask him to forget the memory of his mutilation as easily as you want me to, I must expect him to be an angel."