Blackass (Excerpt) (Electric Literature's Recommended Reading)

4/5 ( ratings)

"Despite its Lagosian setting, when reading the opening pages of Igoni Barrett’s witty, socially insightful novel, Blackass, I am reminded of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: a young man wakes up to the realization that he is no longer who he once was, but has become a different kind of “being.” In Barrett’s version, the young man goes to bed a black man and wakes up white. The family set-up is the same: the young man, his sister, his mother and father. A job on the line." - Chinelo Okparanta, Author of Under the Udala Trees

About the Author: A. Igoni Barrett is the author of Blackass and Love Is Power, or Something Like That. He is the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. He lives in Nigeria.

About the Guest Editor: Chinelo Okparanta was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. A University of Iowa Provost’s Postgraduate Visiting Writer in Fiction as well as a Colgate University Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Fiction, Okparanta received her BS from Pennsylvania State University, her MA from Rutgers University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was one of Granta’s six New Voices for 2012 and is a Lambda Award winner for Lesbian Fiction, an O. Henry Short Story Prize winner, a finalist for the Rolex Mentors and Proteges Arts Initiative, a finalist for the Etisalat Prize for Literature, and a finalist for the Caine Prize, among others. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.

About the Publisher: Electric Literature is an independent publisher amplifying the power of storytelling through digital innovation. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommended great fiction. Once a month we feature our own recommendation of original, previously unpublished fiction.