
A new issue of The Journal of Pan African Studies is out. A new issue of Africa Review of Books is out. Ethel E. Idialu (Ambrose Alli): The Inhuman Treatment of Widows in African Communities. From Inkanyiso, L.E. Mayoyo, P.J. Potgieter, and J.M. Ras (Zululand): Fear of Crime and the Role of the Police. "In 10 years' time, Ghana may not require any aid at all": Ghana is one of Africa's great successes. A revolution deferred: So why did Kinshasa not have its Tahrir moment? How to defuse sub-Saharan
…More than ten million copies of Fifty Shades of Gray have been sold in the U.S. since it went on sale six weeks ago.
One reason why it’s so difficult to predict literary longevity is because of the “high-school popularity problem,” Tom Vanderbilt theorizes, noting that the qualities that make people popular in high school (or the literary world) like being the “radiant prom king, adorned with varsity letters” don’t translate into
…We're fortunate to live in a time where a handful of enormously gifted writers are revitalizing the essay form. One example is Tom Bissell, whose new essay collection Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation, adds up to a kind of narrative of contemporary culture, weighing in on video games, underground literary movements, bad movies and the fates of great writers.
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Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943 and died in Portugal last weekend at the age of 68. Tabucchi was the author of more than two dozen novels, including 1994's "Pereira Declares," and 1997's "The Missing Head of Damascenio Monteiro," a crime novel about the discovery of a headless man. Below is an excerpt from the beginning of "The Missing Head," courtesy of New Directions.
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