Minutes of Glory

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Image | Book Cover: Minutes of Glory by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, honed his craft as a short story writer. From The Fig Tree (Mugumo in this collection), written in 1960, his first year as an undergraduate at Makerere University College in Uganda, to the playful The Ghost of Michael Jackson, written as a professor at the University of California, Irvine, these collected stories reveal a master of the short form.
Covering the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence — and including two stories that have never before been published in the United States — Ngũgĩ's collection features women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society; big men in their Bentleys who have inherited power from the British; and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden. One of Ngũgĩ's most beloved stories, Minutes of Glory, tells of Beatrice, a sad but ambitious waitress who fantasizes about being feted and lauded over by the middle-class clientele in the city's beer halls. Her dream leads her on a witty and heartbreaking adventure. (From The New Press)
Minutes of Glory is available in March 2019.

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