Oprah picks African story collection: 'Say You're One of Them' by Uwem Akpan

Oprah Winfrey, whose book club selection has been known to shoot sales numbers into the stratosphere -- call it the Eat Pray Love Effect -- chose a collection of short stories by Nigerian native Uwem Akpan today.  "Say You're One of Them" is the debut book by Akpan, a Jesuit priest who studied creative writing at the University of Michigan.

The book's stories are set in Africa, and are often told from a child's point of view. "Say You're One of Them" was a finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction -- as was another Oprah Book Club pick, David Wroblewski's "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle." (Has she read "Finding Nouf" by Zoe Ferraris yet? That book took our award).

While popular wisdom in the publishing industry is that short story collections don't sell, Akpan found a major publisher (Little, Brown) which supported his debut. On his website, Akpan writes about the very different world where the stories began:

I was inspired to write by the people who sit around my village church to share palm wine after Sunday Mass, by the Bible, and by the humour and endurance of the poor.

Growing up, my mother told me folktales and got me and my three brothers to read a lot. I became a fiction writer during my seminary days. I wrote at night, when the community computers were free. Computer viruses ate much of my work.

Finally, my friend Wes Harris believed in me enough to get me a laptop. This saved me from the despair of losing my stories and made me begin to see God again in the seminary. The stories I saved on that first laptop are the core of Say You're One of Them.

The idea of Oprah moving to engage her audience with both a short story collection and with fiction set in Africa is certainly welcome among literary types. Most of them, anyway. "['Say You're One of Them'] only reinforces Western stereotypes about Africa -- that it is a wasteland of child soldiers, poverty, and corruption," Rob Spillman, the editor of "Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Fiction," writes in the Huffington Post. "While there are serious problems in much of Africa, this is not the only reality."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Oprah Winfrey. Credit: Kevork Djansezian / Associated Press

Howard Dean's book club and more book news

 

Howard Dean has taken a new chairmanship -- of the Progressive Book Club. Modeled to be a counter to the longtime Conservative Book Club, the Progressive Book Club describes itself as "a 21st century platform that enables people who want to learn, connect, debate, support progressive causes and take action." All while reading books -- sounds tiring.

Michael Connelly recommends five favorite books at the Daily Beast, by Vicki Hendricks, Jesse Katz, George Pelecanos, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Wambaugh. Connelly's new novel, "The Scarecrow," is his best work in 13 years, according to The Times' review.

A new roadie book includes what it says is a decades-old drunken confession of the murderer of Jimi Hendrix. Allegedly, Hendrix's manager was hoping to cash in an insurance policy and keep the rock star from leaving him. No matter how unlikely the claims are, it does make "Rock Roadie: Backstage and Confidential With Hendrix, Elvis, the Animals, Tina Turner, and an All-Star Cast" by James "Tappy" Wright a bit more interesting.

Marilynne Robinson has won the women's-only 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction for "Home." The book, which has garnered many accolades, also won the L.A. Times book prize for fiction in April, and Robinson appeared at the L.A. Times Festival of Books.

Director Danny Boyle -- whose film "Slumdog Millionaire" earned lots of awards -- has acquired the rights to Suketu Mehta's "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found," a nonfiction book that was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Howard Dean with actor Kal Penn in August 2008. Credit: nmfbihop via Flickr.

Hey dude, what are you reading?

Are men's book clubs the wave of the future? They're lapping up all over the shores of Boston Harbor, it seems. The Boston Globe finds several to profile in a piece today:

Men's book groups are coming of age, digging deeper and acquiring a seriousness of purpose commensurate with these serious times. As their members navigate complicated life passages during a period of economic upheaval to which few see an early end, men's book groups increasingly serve as a safe harbor of fellowship and solidarity -- as they long have for women.

Just like women's book groups, it turns out, sometimes they don't get around to talking about the books at all -- instead they wind up eating, drinking and talking about life's vicissitudes. But those that do get to the books have some pretty amusing criteria. Ned Pride, whose men's book group has been meeting for 16 years, explains:

"There has to be something pretty sick going on on page 69 for us to read the book," says Pride. "Either a sexual encounter or some crazy situation. You can count on it with [John] Updike or [Tom] Wolfe, guys like that."

And in a public list on Amazon called Books for Men (The Anti-Oprah Book Club), content seems to be king -- yes, king. Its 10 books, all by men, are particularly manly: "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway, "American Pastoral" by Philip Roth, "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

But that's just where the male book clubs start. Lately, Pride says, the discussion has gotten more serious. "The other night we were talking about evil. Drinking our red wine and talking about evil," Pride told the Globe. "We're moving into a deeper dimension. We don't want to read junk."

--Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: John Updike in 1981. Credit: Washington Post