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ed. Douglas Killam and Ruth Rowe. Oxford: James Currey; Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. xiii + 322 pp. ISBN 0-253-33633-3 cloth.
In 1971 Hans M. Zell published his pioneering A Reader's Guide to African Literature (London: Heinemann). The revised New Reader's Guide to African Literature appeared in 1983 with contributions from Carol Bundy and Virginia Coulon, and has more than 3,000 expansive entries covering biographies and works of writers from all parts of Africa. Unquestionably, the task of these early compilers was facilitated by the fact that the size and volume of this new and burgeoning field was still limited and the professional lives of the writers themselves were stable and quite predictable. With the massive expansion of the field and the increasing transit of the writers across the world through the 1990s, however, African literature is anything but the steady and homogenous activity it was.
Douglas Killam and Ruth Rowe, the compilers of the latest effort aimed at presenting news on the lives and works of writers from all parts of Africa, have risen to the...