`Altogether a pleasure to read. The editors have chosen 20 stories by 20 different writers from all over Africa.' Chinua Achebe, the distinguished Nigerian writer, and C.L. Innes, a lecturer and literary critic of African and Caribbean literature, have collaborated in selecting and introducing this anthology of short stories. Chinua Achebe has taught at the Universities of Nigeria, Massachusetts and Connecticut and among the many honours he has received, he holds the Fellowship of the Modern Language Association of America and doctorates from the Universities of Stirling, Southampton and Kent. His best-selling, classic novel Things Fall Apart, first published in 1958, has now sold over eight million copies and been translated into more than 45 languages. His later novels, short stories and poems have earned him numerous prizes including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Scottish Arts Council Neil Gunn Fellowship. In 1987, he was recognised in Nigeria with the Nigerian National Merit Award - the country's highest award for intellectual achievement. C.L. Innes has taught English and Comparitive Literature at universities in Australia, the United States and England. She has co-edited Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (Heinemann) and published a number of articles on African, Australian and Irish literature. Her other books include The Devil's Own Mirror: The Irish and the African in Modern Literature (Three Continents Press, Washington D.C.) and Chinua Achebe (Cambridge University Press).

Capturing the diversity of African writing from across the continent, this important anthology draws together well-established authors and the best of new writers.
From the harsh realities of South Africa, elegantly described by Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer, to the fantastic world of Booker Prize winner Ben Okri and from the magic realism of Mozambican Mia Couto to the surreal world of Ghanaian Kojo Laing, the editors have distilled the essence of contemporary African writing. Blending the supernatural and the secular, the market-place and the shrine, this anthology gives the reader a taste of the full range of African literary styles.

The past century has witnessed the extraordinary flowering of fiction, poetry and drama from countries previously colonised by Britain, an output which has changed the map of English literature. This introduction, from a leading figure in the field, explores a wide range of Anglophone post-colonial writing from Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, India, Ireland and Britain. Lyn Innes compares the ways in which authors shape communal identities and interrogate the values and representations of peoples in newly independent nations. Placing its emphasis on literary rather than theoretical texts, this book offers detailed discussion of many internationally renowned authors, including James Joyce, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Les Murray and Derek Walcott. It also includes historical surveys of the main countries discussed, a glossary, and biographical notes on major authors. Lyn Innes provides a rich and subtle guide to a vast array of authors and texts from a wide range of sites.

Now updated and available in paperback, this is the first extended study of black and Asian writing in Britain over the last 250 years. Beginning with authors who arrived as immigrants or slaves in the mid-eighteenth century, Innes includes a detailed discussion of works that were often enormously popular in their own time but are almost unknown to contemporary readers. Innes's fascinating study reveals a history of vigorous and fertile interaction between black, Asian and white intellectuals and communities, and an enormously rich and varied literary culture which was already in existence before the post-war efflorescence of black and Asian writing. Utilising a wealth of archival material, Innes examines their work as part of an acceptance of and challenge to British cultural and ideological discourses. This volume offers a rich historical background for understanding contemporary British multicultural society and culture and will be of interest to literary and cultural historians.

The past century has witnessed the extraordinary flowering of fiction, poetry and drama from countries previously colonised by Britain, an output which has changed the map of English literature. This introduction, from a leading figure in the field, explores a wide range of Anglophone post-colonial writing from Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, India, Ireland and Britain. Lyn Innes compares the ways in which authors shape communal identities and interrogate the values and representations of peoples in newly independent nations. Placing its emphasis on literary rather than theoretical texts, this book offers detailed discussion of many internationally renowned authors, including James Joyce, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Les Murray and Derek Walcott. It also includes historical surveys of the main countries discussed, a glossary, and biographical notes on major authors. Lyn Innes provides a rich and subtle guide to a vast array of authors and texts from a wide range of sites.

In 1854, faced with the threat of yet another brutal beating, a fifty-year-old slave in Mason County, Kentucky, decided to try again to escape. His first attempt had ended in his near starvation as he hid for nine weeks in a swamp, before hunger compelled him to return to his master. This time the slave sought the help of a neighbor with abolitionist sympathies, and he joined the hundreds of other fugitive slaves fleeing across the Ohio River and north to Canada on the Underground Railroad. After his arrival in Toronto he discarded his master's surname (Parker), renamed himself Francis Fedric, and married an Englishwoman. In 1857, he traveled with his wife to Great Britain, where he lectured on behalf of the antislavery cause and published two versions of his life story.

Born in Virginia circa 1805, Francis Fedric was not unlike thousands of other African Americans who escaped slavery in the southern states and sought refuge in Britain. Many of his fellow ex-slaves also joined the abolitionist lecture circuit and published memoirs to support both the cause and themselves. Addressed to a British audience, these memoirs constitute a distinctive subgenre of the slave narrative, and an essential continuation of the narrative tradition established in England by Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, and Mary Prince.

The first of Fedric's two memoirs, Life and Sufferings of Francis Fedric, While in Slavery: An Escaped Slave after 51 Years in Bondage (1859), offers a brief but vivid and dramatic twelve-page description of his escape. Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky; or, Fifty Years of Slavery in the Southern States of America (1863) provides a much more detailed account of life as a slave and of plantation culture in the southern states. Together the two works present a mesmerizing and distinct perspective on slavery in the South. Amazingly, these narratives, among the most interesting of the genre, remained out of print for nearly a hundred and fifty years. Collected here for the first time and meticulously edited by C. L. Innes, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky: A Narrative by Francis Fedric, Escaped Slave includes a contextual introduction, substantial biographical information on Fedric, and extensive annotations that situate and illuminate his work.

Long forgotten and never before published in the United States, Fedric's narratives are certain to take their rightful place alongside the most recognizable accounts in the canon of slave memoirs.