Aminatta Forna in conversation with Eula Biss
Aminatta Forna in conversation with Eula Biss
Aminatta Forna discusses her new book
The Window Seat: Notes From a Life In Motion
published by Grove Press
A stunning new collection of essays from the award-winning author of Happiness, The Window Seat explores border crossings both literal and philosophical, our relationship with the natural world, and the stories that we tell ourselves.
"These essays, ranging across continents and time, so broad in their themes and so deep in their perceptions, are essential reading, combining Aminatta Forna's great gifts as a storyteller and her razor-sharp analytical skills."—Salman Rushdie
Aminatta Forna is one of our most important literary voices, and her novels have won the Windham Campbell Prize Literature Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. Now, she returns with The Window Seat, an elegantly rendered, thought-provoking collection of new and previously published essays. In this wide-ranging collection, Forna writes intimately about displacement, trauma and memory, love, and how we coexist and encroach on the non-human world.
In "Obama and the Renaissance Generation," she documents how, despite the narrative of Obama's exceptionalism, his father, like her own, was one of a generation of gifted young Africans who came to the United Kingdom and the United States for education and were expected to build their home countries anew after colonialism. In "The Last Vet," time spent shadowing Dr. Jalloh, the only veterinarian in Sierra Leone, as he works with the street dogs of Freetown, becomes a meditation on what a society's treatment of animals tells us about its principles. In "Crossroads," she examines race in America from an African perspective, and in "Power Walking" she describes what it means to walk in the world in a Black woman's body.
The Window Seat is, in the words of acclaimed author Chinelo Okparanta, “a journey . . . These essay are altogether a sharp, elegant meditation . . . on everything from politics and insomnia to food insecurity and biodiversity.”
Aminatta Forna in conversation with Eula Biss
Aminatta Forna discusses her new book
The Window Seat: Notes From a Life In Motion
published by Grove Press
A stunning new collection of essays from the award-winning author of Happiness, The Window Seat explores border crossings both literal and philosophical, our relationship with the natural world, and the stories that we tell ourselves.
"These essays, ranging across continents and time, so broad in their themes and so deep in their perceptions, are essential reading, combining Aminatta Forna's great gifts as a storyteller and her razor-sharp analytical skills."—Salman Rushdie
Aminatta Forna is one of our most important literary voices, and her novels have won the Windham Campbell Prize Literature Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. Now, she returns with The Window Seat, an elegantly rendered, thought-provoking collection of new and previously published essays. In this wide-ranging collection, Forna writes intimately about displacement, trauma and memory, love, and how we coexist and encroach on the non-human world.
In "Obama and the Renaissance Generation," she documents how, despite the narrative of Obama's exceptionalism, his father, like her own, was one of a generation of gifted young Africans who came to the United Kingdom and the United States for education and were expected to build their home countries anew after colonialism. In "The Last Vet," time spent shadowing Dr. Jalloh, the only veterinarian in Sierra Leone, as he works with the street dogs of Freetown, becomes a meditation on what a society's treatment of animals tells us about its principles. In "Crossroads," she examines race in America from an African perspective, and in "Power Walking" she describes what it means to walk in the world in a Black woman's body.
The Window Seat is, in the words of acclaimed author Chinelo Okparanta, “a journey . . . These essay are altogether a sharp, elegant meditation . . . on everything from politics and insomnia to food insecurity and biodiversity.”
Aminatta Forna is the author of the novels Ancestor Stones, The Memory of Love, and The Hired Man, as well as the memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water. Forna’s books have been translated into sixteen languages. Her essays have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and Vogue. She is currently the Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University.
Visit: https://www.aminattaforna.com/
Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had. Her book On Immunity was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review, and Notes from No Man’s Land won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism in 2009. Her essays and prose poems have recently appeared in the Guardian, the New York Review of Books, The Believer, Freeman’s, Jubilat, the Baffler, Harper’s, and the New York Times Magazine. She teaches nonfiction writing at Northwestern University.