Hi everyone! Don’t forget our April Weird Book Club discussion of Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours begins in a little over half an hour, at 1 PM EDT over on Goodreads.
Come prepared to discuss with your thoughts, questions, and critiques. We can’t wait to hear what you think!
Don’t have a Goodreads account? You can respond in the comments section of this post, or participate on Twitter by using the hashtag #weirdbookclub.
See you there!
To get you in the mood for this weekend’s Weird Book Club discussion about Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, here are some relevant odds and ends for your enjoyment.
In her review of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours in the New York Times, Laura Van Den Berg calls the collection “a cabinet of wonders,” and says, “Oyeyemi so expertly melds the everyday, the fantastic, and the eternal, we have to ask if the line between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ is murkier than we imagined — or to what extent a line exists at all.”
Nor is it just the world on the page that seems to be half-enchanted. In this interview in Vice, Oyeyemi’s comments suggest that the small strangenesses of ordinary life make the barrier between the real and the unreal seem just as permeable as it is in fairy tales. Lines remembered from novels can disappear on rereading and objects like keys (which crop up again and again as symbols in What Is Not Yours . . .) are only “supposedly inanimate.”
In the same interview, Oyeyemi also talks about the politics of representation, as well as her writing process, admitting, “I think slowly, but I write fast.” If you’d like to get more of a sense of Oyeyemi’s sensibilities as a writer and reviser, this writing playlist she put together for Granta is well worth checking out.
Hopefully this has got you excited about talking about What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. Be sure to join us on goodreads this Saturday at 1 PM EDT for our inaugural Weird Book Club discussion!
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