America Introduces Another Fiction Series and It Includes African Writers

A chance visit to Barnes & Noble this afternoon led to this discovery: a book entitled Best African American Fiction 2009. I am already a collector of the Best American Short Stories and all the other bests, so I was thrilled to discover another series.

Best African American Fiction 2009 series is edited by Gerald Early. You know how these series work, right? There is a long-term series editor, who selects a guest editor every year, so the guest editor for the first issue of the series is E. Lynn Harris. The series is published by Bantam Books as a trade edition, you know, the usual stuff. The inaugral issue's ISBN is 9780553385342 and more product details can be found at Bantam-Dell.

The three goals of the series are:

1. to bring to the attention of a wide variety of readers the best fiction published by African Americans in a particular year

2. to bring to their attention some of the lesser known sources that feature African American writing

3. to offer an organic, ongoing anthology wherein, from year to year, one may observe shifts and changes, trends and innovations, in African American fiction writing.

According to the series editor, Gerald Early, the anthology will "attempt to offer writing that has a feeling of immediacy, of urgency, that helps us understand the way we live now."

Right now I am trying to attract people to a dialogue about what makes African literature what it is, the criteria, developments, weaknesses, and so on. So is the Nigeria writer Jude Dibia, who has joined in this necessary debate.

I noticed too that the editor of this new series has thought about the question of definition and territory, going so far as to ask: What is an African American?

For the purpose of anthologizing works for the series, an African American is "any person of color from anywhere in the recognized African Diaspora who lives in the United States either temporarily or permanently, who writes in English, and who is published by an American-based publisher or in an American-based publication."

After seeing this description I looked at the contents and found Nigeria's Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I saw Chris Abani too, and there was a Caribbean author as well. What that means is that some of the stories are not going to be set on American soil, for instance Adichie's "Cell One"; and as a teacher in the American higher education system, I believe that any time students are able to travel beyond these shores, they are enriching their literary education faster....

The contents also showed other powerful authors like ZZ Packer, Junot Diaz, Mat Johnson and many others. The book has a major innovation; it has a section that features Young Adult fiction, and some of the fiction pieces are excerpts from the authors' novels. This can be a perfect reader for literature and even composition classes, a survey of some of the key contemporary African American writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, ZZ Packer, Jacqueline Woodson and Walter Dean Myers.

When I read any of these two-person edited series anthology, I always read the two introductions or prefaces with a passion. So I read both Gerald Early and E. Lynn Harris's introdutions and realized that they are in themselves good sources of information about African American literature; you know you are going to like a book when its two introductions keep mentioning authors you have always loved.

According to Harris, this book might as well be considered a "who's who of contemporary black fiction". And quite a few people out there would appreciate a book like this.

Short stories are great in that they are easy to anthologize and to use in writing workshops and fiction classes. Since Adichie published The Thing Around Your Neck, she has begun to appear in most of the new colleges anthologies being published in the United States, and there are going to be many more where these are coming from because with the recent update by MLA of writing and documentation standards, publishers are going to do what the Shona call chipatapata to publish many--I mean many--updated textbooks.