“So in the end you can’t even really regret your misfortunes,” explains the beloved author Alice Walker, “because they led you somewhere.”
Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet. As the author of The Color Purple…“Walker speaks from experience. From growing up poor in the segregated south and losing part of her vision in a childhood accident to receiving threats from the Ku Klux Klan for her interracial marriage and work with the NAACP in 1960s Mississippi, Walker has experienced her share of hardships. But over the years she has channeled these experiences into groundbreaking fiction about the lives of blacks in America, becoming one of the most celebrated writers of her time. Through her continued dedication to writing and politics she remains a powerful example of what it means to lead a purposeful life.”
Please visit her web site at:
http://alicewalkersgarden.com
Picoult studied creative writing with Mary Morris at Princeton, and had two short stories published in Seventeen magazine while still a student. Realism – and a profound desire to be able to pay the rent – led Picoult to a series of different jobs following her graduation: as a technical writer for a Wall Street brokerage firm, as a copywriter at an ad agency, as an editor at a textbook publisher, and as an 8th grade English teacher – before entering Harvard to pursue a master’s in education. She married Tim Van Leer, whom she had known at Princeton, and it was while she was pregnant with her first child that she wrote her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale…”
Vonnegut has typically used science fiction to characterize the world and the nature of existence as he experiences them. His chaotic fictional universe abounds in wonder, coincidence, randomness and irrationality. Science fiction helps lend form to the presentation of this world view without imposing a falsifying causality upon it. In his vision, the fantastic offers perception into the quotidian, rather than escape from it. Science fiction is also technically useful, he has said, in providing a distance perspective, “moving the camera out into space,” as it were. And unusually for this form, Vonnegut’s science fiction is frequently comic, not just in the “black humor” mode with which he has been tagged so often, but in being simply funny.”
Abani’s best-selling 2004 novel GraceLand is a searing and funny tale of a young Nigerian boy, an Elvis impersonator who moves through the wide, wild world of Lagos, slipping between pop and traditional cultures, art and crime. It’s a perennial book-club pick, a story that brings the postcolonial African experience to vivid life.
