Content area
Full Text
General Area
The Picador Book of African Stories Stephen Gray, ed. London. Picador. 2000 xviii + 285 pages. L16. ISBN 0-330-48540-7
IN THE PICADOR BOOK of African Stories Stephen Gray serves up an outstanding selection of forty stories from twentyseven countries that testifies to the richness, vitality, and wide range of the contemporary African short story. While this genre is probably not as neglected as Gray argues in his introduction, he nevertheless succeeds in his main goal, which is to convince us of the validity of Derek Wright's previous claim that the somewhat limited range of themes and topics addressed by African writers before 1980 has been transcended by a "diverse school of writers" featuring "the hybridization of new subject matters and with hugely increased formal innovation." This is not a comprehensive historical anthology, since its purpose is to offer a window into recent developments in the short story, and there is indeed an exciting freshness to it all.
Most of the stories in Gray's collection are quite recent,...