Contemporary Authors

• What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky ( short stories) Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2017

1.  What it means when a man falls from the sky LCCN 2016036303 Type of material Book Personal name Arimah, Lesley Nneka, author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title What it means when a man falls from the sky / Lesley Nneka Arimah. Published/Produced New York : Riverhead Books, 2017. Description 230 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780735211025 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PS3601.R542 A6 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• New Yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-this-week-lesley-nneka-arimah-2015-10-26

  This Week in Fiction: Lesley Nneka Arimah on Imagining a Universe of Handcrafted Babies
  By Deborah Treisman
  October 19, 2015

  “Who Will Greet You at Home,” your story in this week’s issue, involves a young woman in Nigeria who, in order to have a child, must first fabricate it from a material of her choice, which will determine its character. The fabricated baby will then be blessed by the woman’s mother and come to life, eventually transforming into a flesh-and-blood child. Is this idea drawn from a particular folktale or myth, or is it purely your own?
  It is a myth of my own invention. I am taken with the idea of creating new myths that speak to our current world in the same way that old mythology spoke to the world in its creators’ time. I don’t aim for allegory—as deliberate didacticism in my fiction starts to read like “Very Special Episodes” that I lose interest in completing—but it’s hard to be fully engaged in the world and not have some of those concerns seep into my work. In this case, it was the zealous insistence that young Nigerian women must marry and reproduce as soon as possible in order to give their lives true purpose. I integrated call-and-response into the telling, but the content was borne of a bored afternoon in which a strange idea came to me of a child spun from yarn, alive but not flesh. I sat with the first paragraph of “Who Will Greet You at Home” (then untitled) in a folder for almost a year before the rest of the story had had enough time to brew. At that point, the writing happened quickly.
  Why did you choose, in the story, to eliminate men from the reproductive process? (And, in fact, from the story as a whole—no man ever appears in the narrative.)
  There are many reasons why one would imagine a world without men, but, in this case, it wasn’t something I intentionally set out to do. Men simply never came up in my vision of this world. Perhaps there exists an alternate universe of men who insure their survival in equally fraught ways. Someone (else?) will have to write that. I do think it's interesting that the story was able to replicate the pressure that women feel to reproduce, even though the world has no men. I think the ease of that replication speaks to the systematic, rather than individual, nature of such pressures.
  In your first paragraph, you have Ogechi tell herself, “If she was to mother a child, to mute and subdue and fold away parts of herself, the child had to be perfect.” Do you think motherhood always requires that kind of self-sacrifice?
  I often joke with my friends who have children that, if I were to invest as much work as they have into raising a child, that kid had better be gorgeous, smart, and hilarious. Or at least two of the three. It would have to be worth having to share every candy bar I tried to eat in the child’s presence. I like to take off-kilter sentiments like those and increase the wattage to see what sort of story they can produce. In this case, that exaggerated outlook didn't have a place in a “real world” story, but it was perfectly at home in this universe of handcrafted babies, where the mother is fully culpable for the way her child looks and acts. This sort of experimentation is what draws me to magical realism. I can take a very human desire, insert it into a supernatural world, and watch humanity become grotesque. An element of surrealism in a story can put pressure on a character in ways that would be impossible in our natural world, and when you make the world surreal but keep the characters human, the juxtaposition creates interesting textures in the narrative.
  But, to answer the question, I don’t think motherhood always requires that kind of self-sacrifice. In fact, I dislike the “mother as martyr” style of parenting that is sometimes viewed as motherhood in its purest form. It’s not complicated enough, and I am suspicious of prescriptions for human behavior that don’t take into account how knotty and multifarious humans are.
  Why do you think the hair baby turns out the way it does?
  If, in the world of the story, a child made of one person's hair is infused with her personality, then a child made of the hairs of many different people is imbued with dozens of personalities, each presumably wanting to be dominant. I can't imagine this resulting in a healthy being. But I don't want to examine the hair baby too closely and unravel the mystery of it. Sometimes you’ve got to give the reader just enough to accept what’s happening in the world of the story, and no more. It’s the same reason that much of what the hair babies do—in the main story and in the inserted fable—remains off-screen, unspoken but understood. So much of this tale is hyperbolic that I would have had to go nuclear if I wanted the acts of violence to be effective. It was more interesting to examine the aftermath—more challenging to write, too.
  You won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa this year, but you haven’t yet published a book, right? Do you have plans for a collection of stories?
  Yes, I'm currently working on a collection of stories, and a novel as well.
  Deborah Treisman is The New Yorker’s fiction editor and the host of its Fiction Podcast.Read more »

• Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR - http://www.npr.org/2017/04/01/522284707/stories-of-parents-and-children-in-what-it-means-when-a-man-falls-from-the-sky

  Author Interviews
  < Stories Of Parents And Children In 'What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky' April 1, 20178:04 AM ET Listen· 4:36 4:36 Queue Download Embed Facebook Twitter Google+ Email SCOTT SIMON, HOST: One of the most anticipated books of the year is out - "What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky." It's the first book of short stories from Lesley Nneka Arimah who's won an African Commonwealth prize among many others. It's a book that ranges from the story of a child that a mother weaves from hair to a father's anxiety for the daughter he sends out into the world and an upturned world that's ravaged by natural disasters that can have everlasting results. Lesley Nneka Arimah joins us from Bagamoyo, Tanzania. Thanks so much for being with us. LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH: Thank you for having me. SIMON: Let's begin with this title story, "What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky." This is a world, in many ways, that you've turned upside down in just a few short pages. Tell us about this world. ARIMAH: Yes. You know, I was interested in sort of imagining what an alternate future would look like if climate change is taken to its ultimate conclusion. And so within this world, the continents that are consumed by the rising floodwaters are Europe and America. And so westerners now become refugees coming to South America to Africa to Australia. And I said I wanted to play with the idea of the reversal of fortunes in that way. SIMON: And also out of your imagination, the story "Who Will Greet You At Home." That was a National Magazine Award finalist when you wrote it for The New Yorker. This begins with a woman who wants a child and weaves one out of hair. What is this world you reveal? ARIMAH: So I like speculative stories - you know, magical realism, fantasy, science fiction, what have you - because we can take sort of things that we take for granted as rules to follow in our world. And, suddenly, when you place them in this, you know, magical world, it takes on different connotations. And so in this case, it was the expectation that every woman should and desires to have a child that's as perfect as she can make it. And so, you know, once you take that natural desire that we have in our world and put this in this magical world, it's little sinister. It's a little more complicated. It's a little more interesting. SIMON: You, I gather, were born in the United Kingdom? ARIMAH: Yes. I was. And, you know, we were there for maybe a few months and then relocated back to Nigeria. SIMON: And at some point, you came to the United States? ARIMAH: When I was 13, yes. My father was transferred here for work, and we moved to Louisiana of all places (laughter), which is not a place that's not known for its large Nigerian population. But I think - you know, what I love about Louisiana, which I did not love at that point, was how it's a pretty unique culture. I think it's the most distinct part of United States. SIMON: I wonder if that experience sort of encouraged you to create these other worlds you write about? ARIMAH: Well, you know, I have always sought comfort in books. And so, you know, in the confusion of being a teenager, you know, thrust into this unfamiliar world, you know, books became my refuge. And so I didn't think so at the time, but it was inevitable that I would end up seeking to become a writer. SIMON: Why do you think so many people are interested in post-apocalyptic worlds at this point? ARIMAH: The idea of the sort of dystopias has been gaining interest for the last couple of years, and I think that at some point we all know deep down that we're doomed. And so I think we're just sort of imagining the futures that are coming. SIMON: Oh, my, do you really think we're all doomed? ARIMAH: I do. I'm a bit of a pessimist. I do think that human nature has sort of proven time and time again that we will indulge our baser impulses. I feel like we are on a cycle. So we do well for a while and then things go downhill. We just sort of keep, you know, riding this merry go round, and so we're doomed. SIMON: Boy, I don't think I've ever ended an interview like that before. But can we get through the weekend, do you think? ARIMAH: (Laughter) I think we can. I certainly hope so. SIMON: Speaking with us from Bagamoyo, Tanzania, Lesley Nneka Arimah. Her new book, "What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky." Thanks so much. ARIMAH: Thank you.

• Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2017/07/the-rumpus-interview-with-lesley-nneka-arimah/

  As Long as What Is Said Is Understood: Talking with Lesley Nneka Arimah
  By Maggie Cooper
  July 28th, 2017

  What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is the kind of book I can’t stop talking about. Only three or four stories in, I was already recommending it to anyone who would listen: my girlfriend, my officemate, a near-stranger on Facebook. It is the kind of book I want to thrust into the hands of short-story lovers and short-story skeptics alike, for who could fail to be won over by its imagination, its muscularity, its technical prowess, its exhilarating scope?
  I was first introduced to Lesley Nneka Arimah’s work through our mutual friend Kendra Fortmeyer, who recommended Lesley’s New Yorker story “Who Will Greet You at Home” as required reading for the lover of contemporary magical realism. As Kendra had promised, I devoured the piece, reveling in its original blend of folktale, horror story, and social critique—the story takes place in an alternate Nigeria, where babies are crafted from materials such as yarn, mud, and human hair, and I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this presents more than a few complications. That story took me to others, until I found myself waiting impatiently for the release of What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Lesley’s debut collection.
  Needless to say, it was worth the wait. The book, out from Riverhead this past April, has garnered praise from critics at the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and elsewhere. Lesley is a two-time finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing and the 2015 winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa; her other honors include an O. Henry Award, as well as numerous grants and fellowships. It’s an impressive list for a debut writer, but it’s no surprise to those who are familiar with Lesley’s stories.
  Lesley is like a surgeon on the page—deft and efficient, cutting close to the bone and letting the blood flow to present truths with the power to both wound and heal. Lesley’s fiction reveals, interrogates, and invents, drawing from the realms of literary realism, science fiction, folktale, and beyond to create something entirely unique and captivating.
  In emails exchanged in the weeks immediately before and after the book’s release, Lesley and I discussed mother-daughter relationships, story structure, and Spanx as a metaphor for the relationship between art and religion.
  ***
  The Rumpus: One of the first things that struck me upon reading the collection—after, of course, “Oh my goodness, this is so brilliant, how does she do it?”—was the near-omnipresence of these nuanced, vividly rendered parent-child relationships. I don’t mean this to say in any way that there is something repetitious here: the parents and children that we get are so richly varied, from the goddess of rivers and her twins, to Ogechi with her baby made of hair and Buchi calculating these awful compromises for herself and her daughters—and that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve seen you talk about your interest in this before—the ideas of legacy and the disconnects in what is and is not passed down. In looking at all these stories, if you can talk about what it is that drives you to keep returning to this territory?
  Lesley Nneka Arimah: I find myself drawn to the many different ways family dynamics can manifest. What if a child is being raised by parents who dislike her? Or like her so much they’re always in the way? How many ways can a child be disappointing? It’s like walking a maze that can be solved several different ways. I want to try out every path, to encounter something new. I want to think through (and write) all the possible permutations of what a family can look like. By that same token, I’m interested in how varied family legacies can be. What do we pass down to our children that we shouldn’t? How do we cripple them by keeping or sharing family secrets? It’s all very fascinating.
  Rumpus: We get fathers here, too, but the emphasis seems to skew toward mothers and daughters. There’s something especially freighted there, I think—I certainly feel it as a daughter myself. What draws you to that particular relationship?
  Arimah: This probably falls partly into the “write what you know” category. I know what it is to be a daughter and when I imagine parenting, it’s motherhood I’d have to contend with. The other draw is that we have such strict societal rules about what a “good mother” looks like that I find it more interesting to subvert those rules than I would with fatherhood. Fathers are generally permitted to be distant and sometimes even absent and still fall into the realm of acceptable (or at least forgivable) fatherhood. Women do not have that luxury.
  Rumpus: You mentioned on the Loft Literary podcast recently that before you began taking creative writing classes, you actually planned to attend law school—and although obviously I am thrilled that you decided not to go in that direction, I sense in your stories a very real interest in justice and injustice. The final story in the collection, “Redemption,” is a great example of that in the way that it presents the collision of righteousness with a decidedly unrighteous structure of power and authority. How do you think about justice in your writing? (And of course, there’s also the fact that so many lawyers have been prolific writers—I’m constantly thinking of Hamilton, the musical, which gives us a great example of that!)
  Arimah: A moment of reverence for the glory that is Hamilton. As for addressing justice/injustice in my writing, while it’s not something I consciously set out to do, I do have ideas about what is right and wrong and so it’s bound to seep into my work. Those ideas can be divided into institutional and interpersonal, and I find that they often diverge. For example, my ideas regarding interpersonal rightness vs. wrongness are less about cosmetics or calls to “be nice,” as I think niceness can mask injustice and make it easier to swallow. In that sense interpersonal righteousness can be flexible (most people wouldn’t think it wrong to call someone kicking a dog an asshole, for example). Whereas institutions must always aim towards justice, rightness, if they are to be useful to all members of society.
  Rumpus: So what you’re saying is that, while righteousness can be situational, on an individual basis, institutions occupy a different kind of space?
  Arimah: Yes, they do, and in fact that’s what’s so disturbing about the current political climate. Institutions have always been imperfect reflections of the prejudices of those in power, and now those in power are actively and publicly molding public-serving institutions after their own prejudices. Such models are only sustainable by apathy or violence. Again, this is not something I directly address or think about when I write, but it’s always doing its thing in my subconscious, which undoubtedly comes out in my work.

  Rumpus: I’d love to hear about your education. You did your MFA at Minnesota State, and I’ve also heard you talk about your experience at VONA. What has workshop taught you as a writer? As a writing teacher, how do you see your role in your students’ development? I’m so interested in the way that we make the journey from novice writer to something more.
  Arimah: It must be said that all workshops aren’t created equal. I don’t value workshops for their own sake, but only when then are honest and useful. I think that bad workshops can teach a writer bad habits, especially if they encounter them too early in the process of learning how to write. VONA was an interesting (and life-changing) experience for me because it was the first workshop where I was being read by a group of entirely non-white readers, many from non-US backgrounds, and in that particular case it meant that no one asked or cared about the “exotic” content of my work. The focus was on craft and story and all those writerly things, and it was the first time in my American education that I felt truly read and understood. It’s something that’s easy to take for granted when being understood, on a cultural level, isn’t a thing you ever have to think about. It made me demand a better class of response to my work, which made me demand a better class of work from myself. As an instructor, I try to recreate that for my students, that permission and desire to demand better for and from yourself whatever the workshop dynamics may be.
  Rumpus: One thing that really delighted me about this collection was the fearless mixing of speculative and non-speculative elements—the mathematical formula that allows for the extraction of human sadness in the title story or the return of the dead mother from a photograph in “Second Chances” combined with the kinds of real human relationships we’ve already discussed. How do you think about your relationship with the tradition of magical realism? I have heard you use that term for your work before—are there other terms that come to mind also? In some ways, I think that this idea of naming genre can be overly semantic; however, in other ways, I think it’s important and interesting to make distinctions between ways of approaching the speculative or the fantastic.
  Arimah: I often don’t care what things are called, or what the right word for something is, as long as what is said is understood. Magical realism, speculative, fantasy, science fiction—these are all terms I (and others) have used to describe my work, and I’m fine with all those labels. I’m sure there are arguments for the appropriateness of one or the other, but I’m not heavily invested (unless someone is trying to disparage any one of those genres. Then I’ll likely come to its defense).
  (After penning this response I came across a discussion spearheaded by @justabookeater_ on Twitter that referenced Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Nobel lecture and made the case that magical realism is the specific territory of Latin American writers interrogating colonialism and how more appropriate terms for non-Latin American writers of speculative works that don’t deal specifically with postcolonialism is “fabulism” or “surrealist fiction.” I don’t have a problem with this. There are postcolonial works by continental and diasporic black writers that technically fit under this umbrella of postcolonial interrogation, so it will be interesting to see where the discussion goes from here.)
  As for my relationship with the tradition of magical realism, I should say something obvious and true about Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude is in my ancestral cannon), but I keep coming back to the world I grew up in. We accepted the existence of a spiritual world that is as robust and complex as the physical one I’m typing this in. In “Who Will Greet You at Home,” for example, the evil hair baby is related, tangentially, to the old superstition many people are no doubt familiar with that someone could put a root on you if they got a hank of your hair. It’s not a one-to-one correlation, but they’re connected, these ideas of hair and magic. Maybe I was just very suggestible, but growing up I believed just about everything I was told about spirits and witches and angels and demons, so they were part of how I engaged with the world. Growing up in a spiritual and evangelical household means that your realism is actually magical realism, with no distinctions, and so yes, of course a woman’s ghost can step out of a photograph and cook dinner.
  Rumpus: I love that. Is there more to say about how the religious aspect of your childhood shaped your writing? How it shapes you now? I love the radio show On Being, and the host, Krista Tippett, always asks guests about “the spiritual or religious background of their upbringing.” Is that a question that interests you?
  Arimah: It’s a question that interests me up to a point, typically only if the person has left a restrictive faith. I recently attended the Guillermo del Toro exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and he talks about how Catholicism constrained him as a child. He wouldn’t be creating the work he is if he’d stayed in the church; it’s too weird, it would have been considered “demonic.” That’s what I find interesting, that he had the awareness to see the particular ways in which the church muted him and decided to exchange it for the freedom to be his weird self. I think that there are personalities that can live within those religious constraints and those that can’t. And when you can’t, it’s like wearing Spanx, but all the time, and you are forced to grow into a shape that looks normal, but that you find extremely uncomfortable. And when you finally take the Spanx off, you want to breathe all the air, and eat all the things, and get a set of clothes that actually fit.
  Rumpus: In that Loft Literary interview, you talked about originally ordering the collection on a continuum from most realist to most magical—I assume “What Is a Volcano?” was last in that line-up, but which story came first?
  Arimah: The first story was “The Future Looks Good,” same as it is now. I can’t imagine starting with anything else. It’s short, punchy and provides a decent thematic summary of the rest of the book. It’s also, coincidentally, the first story I wrote when I finally figured out how this whole short story thing works.
  Rumpus: If I’m not mistaken, you’re finishing a novel now. How’s it going? Can we expect to see magical realist elements?
  Arimah: Yes, you can expect magical realist elements. As for how it’s going, I need you to use your auditory imagination to conjure up a long sigh. That would be my editor waiting for my final draft (I swear it’s coming).
  Rumpus: There’s also a sense of play at work in these stories—both on the level of the imagination and on the level of the line—although the collection as a whole takes on some very serious territory, we get these laugh-out-loud sentences, like “When Glory’s parents christened her Glorybetogod Ngozi Akunyili, they did not foresee Facebook’s “real name” policy” or “My father and I have never spoken of the state he found me in, Alabama.” What’s the role of play or playfulness in your work? In your writing process?
  Arimah: I find humor and play to be very important, especially when dealing with heavy topics, both for the reader and for myself. It relieves the building pressure, not enough to deflate the story, but just so that the reader feels safe enough to laugh, lulling them into a (often false) sense of relief. Most of the humor comes to me as the story unfolds, but I’ll sometimes dip into a document where I save all kinds of snippets and one-liners and look for something that pairs well with the story I’m working on.
  Rumpus: It seems like there are a lot of conversations these days about “sympathetic” female characters (can we agree that this is probably sexist nonsense?). In reading these stories, I so admired the ways in which you don’t shy away from how terrible people can be, not necessarily on the grand moral scale, but in smaller, more mundane ways. “Glory” is a great example of this. Almost anything she does makes me cringe, but I believe all of it, and I understand why she does what she does. And I may be an over-empathizer, but I totally feel for her.
  Arimah: Yes, I find the preoccupation with sympathetic female characters sexist, but also really dishonest. We all know disagreeable or unlikeable people, some of whom are women, so why the jawing when women write women who are objectionable? Why the need to smother this particular rendition of the human experience? It feels less like a commentary on the story itself and more like a criticism of the writer. Because we tend to read works by women as being confessional or inspired by their real life, the underlying question about sympathetic characters seems to be “why would you want to write such an unlikeable character, don’t you want people to like them (and, by extension, you)?”
  To actually address your point, I love an unsympathetic female character we can root for (or even one that we can’t). There’s something very satisfying about writing a character that’s flawed, mean, and possibly evil in a way that still makes the reader pull for, or at least understand, them. I don’t think women who create such characters are doing anything revolutionary, we’re just writing full, realistic people. It’s they way these characters are received that turns it into an issue.
  Rumpus: “Glory” also completely undermines romance in a way that interests me. They’re going through all the meet-cute motions, but there’s something totally different going on here, and we know that a “happily ever after” is not in the cards. There’s certainly love in this collection—especially the love between parents and children—but there’s not much in the way of love stories. We get a little glimpse of the relationship in “What It Means…,” but that certainly doesn’t end well for anyone either. Yet, I also hear you like romance novels. Me too! Can we talk about that?
  Arimah: Is it possible to be a cynical romantic? I’m not entirely sure the two can exist in the same space, but here I am. What I love about romance novels is that we know exactly how the book is going to end (boy and girl get each other), and so the author must make the journey interesting. I’m all about the interesting journey. I hate “will-they-won’t-they” plot devices in any genre of book (such a lazy way to build tension), and with romance novels you know they will, usually around page one hundred and thirty-four. I do find that I have less patience for badly written romance novels since I started reading them again as an adult, but that cuts across all books. With “genre” fiction, there’s a formula to it, and what I enjoy are works that combine the formula (the comfort of a recognizable pattern, routine) with the unexpected. Eloisa James is very good at this.
  Rumpus: Speaking of structure, I wanted to ask you specifically about the rule of threes. I think we have this idea that something like the rule of threes is too elementary for “sophisticated writers,” but “Windfalls,” I think, is a great example of a story that uses the rule of threes brilliantly. The story operates around three main incidents that escalate to a pretty devastating turn in the last few pages—the first time I read it, I was in the lobby of a bank, and I found myself so incredibly engaged and satisfied that I wanted to tell everyone standing there about the story. There’s nothing about the use of a three-part structure that cheapens what’s going on—there’s still so much nuance in the detail and characterization and the moral dilemmas presented. In fact, I would say that the relatively simple structure and brevity of the story allows all that to hit us harder. (“Who Will Greet You At Home,” I think, does something similar with structure, in a way that also evokes the fairy tale.) Anyway, all this is a very lengthy way of asking—how do you think about structure as a writer? As a reader?
  Arimah: I love structure; I love plot. I love when things happen and then other things happen as a result of things happening and then, and then, and then. I’ll read anything, but as a writer, plot is what keeps me coming back to the page. It’s very satisfying to create a puzzle of events for my characters to navigate. I also think a good plot gives weight and dimension to a character’s introspection. It’s so much more interesting that Ike thinks about his mother when he’s being kidnapped a mile down the street from his childhood home, than when he’s on a walk, just thinking, unkidnapped.
  The rule of threes is an intuitive storytelling structure. Hell, it’s practically Biblical. I think its ubiquitousness speaks to something I touched on earlier, the comfort of pattern. Our brains are wired to pattern; it creates a shortcut so that we know what’s coming up next and can dedicate mental energy toward something else. For a writer, this means being free to go crazy with the details while operating within the familiarity of a structure most of us will choose subconsciously. The brevity of a short story compresses the structure, rendering it more apparent, but a good many novels employ the same structure, too.
  The other thing with pattern, however, is that it can be pleasant to have those expectations violated. It tickles another part of the brain that, upon determining there’s no immediate danger, is, well, tickled—humor relies heavily on this violation of expectations… (This is starting to turn into one of my class lectures, which I won’t bore you with.)
  Rumpus: When I taught elementary school, we used to talk about “mentor texts”—the pieces of writing or writers we turn to as guides for our writing. Is that a term that makes sense to you? Were there mentor texts that guided you as you were working on the story in this collection? What were they?
  Arimah: I don’t engage with work in quite that way (consulting or being guided by specific texts as I write), but there are works I encountered at certain points on my writing path that had a significant impact on my writing in general and the collection eventually. I really love the story collection Man V. Nature by Diane Cook. I didn’t read the entire collection until I was well into writing the stories in my collection, but I encountered one of her stories (“Somebody’s Baby”) right after I graduated from my MFA program, before I’d written any of these. I was probably looking for contests to enter, and it had just been published as the winner of Salt Hill’s Italo Calvino Prize. It was one of the works I read around that time that made me realize what a long way I had to go, such a long way that I stopped writing for a while and focused on giving myself a writer’s education (reading and reading and reading). “Somebody’s Baby” also dealt with motherhood in a speculative context, in the tight, brilliant package of a short story, and it stayed in my subconscious, brewing.
  Rumpus: Before we finish, I wanted to talk about Twitter for just a minute—what do you get out of it? Is there an itch that Twitter scratches for you? Is that a writerly itch, do you think?
  Arimah: Twitter definitely scratches an itch, both writerly and social. I used to live in a rural part of the country and there were very few people to socialize with day to day and so Twitter filled the role of a social group, both keeping me involved in the day-to-day lives of my distant friends and introducing me to new people. If I were living in Minneapolis at the time, with easier access to a social circle, who knows if Twitter would have become as important, but it’s now part of my routine. I follow all the major newspapers and I follow lit journals and blogs of interest and Twitter is the portal through which I visit most of them. As for tweeting, I do it a lot, and it’s enjoyable as an introvert to have conversations without the awkwardness of positioning and interpreting faces and bodies. It’s also just plain fun.
  Rumpus: Okay, now here’s a big scary final question: You said in an interview at The Butter, “My perfect piece of art would be daring and unapologetic in a way that is vulnerable, and would be a mirror that reveals the grotesquely human parts of ourselves.” I could write a whole essay (maybe I will!) about the ways that this collection is doing all of these things—but I’m curious to hear from you, is there a part of all this that you think you’re still working on, or striving toward? Or is has your definition of perfection shifted at all in the couple of years since you said that—to what extent is the perfect piece of art a moving target?
  Arimah: If I had to answer that question now, I don’t know that I’d give the same response, so I suppose that my definition of perfection has changed. Or perhaps, this book has fulfilled that particular desire, and now my art is moving in a different direction. I’m still drawn to our human grotesquerie, but I find myself interested in going beyond revelation to… I’m not sure what exactly. Now that we’ve got the skin off, I want to peel my way to the core.

• Paper Darts - http://www.paperdarts.org/blog/2017/7/12/interview-lesley-nneka-arimah

  An Interview with Lesley Nneka Arimah

  Introducing Lesley Nneka Arimah,
  the judge of our second
  Paper Darts Micro-Fiction Award.
   

  Lesley Nneka Arimah is a Nigerian writer living in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, GRANTA, and other publications. What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, her debut collection of stories, was published in April by Riverhead Books. 

  Q: What is your current obsession? (That is, what are you reading? Or what are you playing? What are you watching? What are you listening to on repeat?)

  I am a cliché in that I have the Hamilton cast album on near-constant repeat. It has become comfort food. I’m also watching a lot of Steven Universe.

  Q: What are your biggest pet peeves you find in other peoples’ writing?

  Throat-clearing—that is, when the writer hedges their bets and wastes too much time setting up the premise because they don’t trust the reader’s interest/intelligence/what have you. Just make it good and the reader will follow you wherever you take them.

  Q: Describe your home:

  A two-bedroom apartment on a quiet street where one bedroom is supposed to be my office, but has morphed into a craft/storage/second closet/guest room. I write in bed.
  Prized furniture: two salvaged church pews.

  Q: What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

  I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone who follows me on Twitter, but I have handful of romance novels nestled in between poetry collections and National Book Award winners.

  Q: What is the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning?

  Deadlines with consequences.

  Q: What is your most reliable antidote to negative thoughts?

  Reading (she said, unoriginally).
  I can get lost in another world for a while.

• Brittle Paper - http://brittlepaper.com/2017/07/caineprize2017-interview-lesley-nneka-arimah-africa-dialogue/

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  Features, Interviews
  2017/07/03

  #CainePrize2017 | On Motherhood, Class and Fabulist Fiction | Interview with Lesley Nneka Arimah

  Africa in Dialogue has collected interviews with the five authors shortlisted for the 2017 Caine Prize in an e-book. The interviews were all conducted by the magazine’s editor, Gaamangwe Joy Mogami. We are republishing select interviews from the e-book.
  *
  Nigeria’s Lesley Nneka Arimah is shortlisted for “Who Will Greet You At Home,” published in The New Yorker (USA, 2015). Lesley Nneka Arimah is the author of What It Means When A Man Falls from the Sky, a collection of stories published by Riverhead Books (US) and Tinder Press (UK), 2017. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Per Contra and other publications. Lesley was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2016 and was a participant in the Caine Prize 2017 workshop in Tanzania. Her story, “Light,” won the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa Region and another, “Glory,” won a 2017 O.Henry Award. This conversation took place via email between Gaamangwe Mogami in a green bedroom in the cold, sweetspot of Gaborone, Botswana and Lesley Arimah in London, UK. Here, they discuss motherhood, class, and fabulist fiction.
  Gaamangwe
  So first, congratulations on being shortlisted for the Caine Prize award! This is the second time that you have been shortlisted for the award. How are you feeling about being shortlisted this time around?
  Lesley Nneka Arimah
  I feel honored to be shortlisted among another crop of wonderful stories. I don’t envy the judges their decision.
  Gaamangwe
  I know! Such incredible writings. It’s exciting to witness all these diverse and innovative stories. Your story is fascinating and haunting. How did this story come to you? What did it want to say?
  Lesley Nneka Arimah
  I didn’t want to “say” anything in particular as I avoid such didacticism in my fiction. The story came to me as many of my stories often do, with an image I couldn’t shake, this one of a baby made out of yarn but alive. The rest of the story revealed itself eventually, focusing on Ogechi’s quest to mother a perfect child. I wanted to explore what the process of motherhood might look like outside of the framework of a society we are familiar with.
  Gaamangwe
  I find it fascinating the ways an origin of a story can be as simple as an image, that later unravels a universe that even outside our framework still feels familiar. Ogechi’s yearning for a perfect child is a very familiar thing. Don’t we always yearn for perfect creations? But what fascinates you about frameworks that we are not familiar with? 
  Lesley Nneka Arimah
  That act of taking the familiar and locating it in a strange place creates an interesting juxtaposition where the familiar, the normal, can become grotesque out of context. That’s one of the reasons fabulist stories appeal to me, that we can take something from our world and see how it behaves in a different one.
  Gaamangwe
  Fabulist stories also allow us to look into our human ways in a way that it feels removed from ourselves but in reality it really reflects our real ways. Say, in reality when you do mix a lot of different personalities in a room, it is never smooth sailing. What are your thoughts on human ways in particular towards motherhood?
  Lesley Nneka Arimah
  That’s a broad topic that covers a lot of ground, but in the case of this story I wanted to go beyond the expectation that every woman should have a child and examine what comes next. What type of child does a woman want and how far will she go to get it? Ogechi is selfish about everything, even about her insistence on having a child only if it’s enviable. She views motherhood as something that takes from her, be it resources or love, and she has decided she can only give resources and love to a perfect child. There is a class element at work too, as she wants a child that is beyond her means to sustain. She is in a difficult position which leads to her fateful decision.
  Gaamangwe
  It is disturbing how far she is willing to do everything to get the perfect child. Beyond class, is her relationship with her mother also influencing her obsession with having the perfect child? A sort of displacement. But also, how much is her obsession a creation of society? The question that came to my head is how much of a woman’s yearning of a child is a creation of societal forces or indirect inner urges for something else (to be loved and to love unconditionally, to belong or own someone)?
  Lesley Nneka Arimah
  Ogechi’s mother is living the life Ogechi doesn’t want, ordinary mother to an ordinary child of their class. If anything it’s a form of self-hate. Ogechi thinks highly of herself, but not highly enough to want a child like herself. She has painted herself into a strange little corner. As for whether “a woman’s yearning of a child is a creation of societal forces or indirect inner urges for something else (to be loved and to love unconditionally, to belong or own someone)”—for Ogechi the motivation is probably a mixture of all three. But, again, the story concerns itself with what happens after Ogechi has succumbed to those forces/urges.
  Gaamangwe
  An important thing to explore really. Beyond this story, what are your own urges as a writer? What is important for you to create as a writer?
  Lesley Nneka Arimah
  I write to satisfy the many stories brewing inside me. It is important to me to create work that is honest and that demands honesty.
  Gaamangwe
  Thank you Lesley for joining me. All the best of luck with your writing and the Caine Prize.
  *

• Lesley Nneka Arimah Website - http://www.larimah.com/

  Lesley Nneka Arimah was born in the UK and grew up wherever her father was stationed for work, which was sometimes Nigeria, sometimes not.
  Her work has received grants and awards from Commonwealth Writers, AWP, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Jerome Foundation and others. She currently lives in Minneapolis.
  Forthcoming from Riverhead Books: WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY (story collection; April 2017) and THE CHILDREN OF BONES (novel; yeah, about that…)

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

Donna Seaman
113.14 (Mar. 15, 2017): p21.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky.
By Lesley Nneka Arimah.
Apr. 2017. 240p. Riverhead, $26 (9780735211025).

Arimah, a young writer of the UK, Nigeria, and the U.S., debuts with a slender yet mighty short story collection that delivers one head-snapping smack after another. Arimah's potently concentrated portrayals of young women who can't stop themselves from doing the wrong thing, especially by refusing to adhere to traditional Nigerian expectations for females to be obedient and self-sacrificing, possess tremendous psychological and social depth and resonance. Like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, she writes with subtlety and poignancy about the struggles of love and hope between daughters and mothers and fathers, including relationships complicated by the legacy of the Biafran War, class divides, and transatlantic separations, as in "Wild," in which an introuble American teen is sent to live with her aunt in Lagos. Arimah's emotional and cultural precision and authenticity undergird her most imaginative leaps. She flirts with horror fiction, presents a ghost story, and creates an arresting form of magic realism in sync with that of Shirley Jackson, George Saunders, and Colson Whitehead. Babies are made of yarn, hair, and mud. In the title story, "Mathematicians" devote themselves to "calculating and subtracting emotions, drawing them from living bodies like poison from a wound." Arimah's stories of loss, grief, shame, fury, and love are stingingly fresh and complexly affecting. --Donna Seaman
YA: YAs will find Arimah's propulsive prose and watchful often defiant girls and young women in conflict with parents and society deeply engaging. DS.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 21. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490998426&it=r&asid=407c0b126a2658326c5d230ee02c2dd1. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A490998426

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

264.9 (Feb. 27, 2017): p72.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
Lesley Nneka Arimah. Riverhead, $26 (240p) ISBN 978-0-7352-1102-5

In her powerful and incisive debut collection, Arimah shuttles between continents and realities to deliver 12 stories of loss, hope, violence, and family relationships. In "Wild," a reckless teenage girl is sent from America to her aunt in Nigeria, only to get caught up in the life of her equally reckless cousin. "Second Chances" sees a deceased mother magically reappear in her family's life, with mixed results, and "Buchi's Girls" is about a widow struggling to raise two daughters while living in her sister's house. Mother and daughter grifters deal with an unexpected pregnancy in "Windfalls," while the collection's futuristic title story explores a world in which mathematicians have unlocked the secrets to all humanity, allowing humans to remove emotional pain from others and disrupt the laws of nature. Arimah gracefully inserts moments of levity into each tale and creates complex characters who are easy to both admire and despise. From the chilling opening story, "The Future Looks Good," structured like a Russian nesting doll, to the closing story, "Redemption," this collection electrifies. (Apr.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky." Publishers Weekly, 27 Feb. 2017, p. 72. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485671150&it=r&asid=075ccac3488669793fc81d6e6d3b2a52. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A485671150

Arimah, Lesley Nneka: WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY

(Feb. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Arimah, Lesley Nneka WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY Riverhead (Adult Fiction) $26.00 4, 4 ISBN: 978-0-7352-1102-5
Nigeria serves as a prism refracting the myriad experiences of both former and current inhabitants.In two different stories in Arimah's debut collection, characters have the supernatural ability to drain emotions from other people, for good or for ill. In "Who Will Greet You at Home," a Nigerian woman participates in a tradition of making children out of inanimate materials and having them blessed by older women in hopes that they will become real. But these blessings come at a price--in her case, "Mama" blesses the child in exchange for the protagonist's own joy, "siphoned a bit, just a dab...a little bit of her life for her child's life." In the title story, figures known as Mathematicians are able to use precise algorithms and equations to relieve negative emotions from customers who can afford it. This power over feelings is as good a metaphor as any for storytelling. And Arimah has skill in abundance: the stories here are solid and impeccably crafted and strike at the heart of the most complicated of human relationships. Against a backdrop of grief for dead parents or angst over a lover, Arimah uses Nigeria as her muse. The characters exist in relation to a Nigeria of the past--the ghost of the Nigerian civil war, especially, looms over many of the stories--as well as present-day Nigeria, either as citizens or expats. Arimah even imagines a future Nigeria in which it has become the "Biafra-Britannia Alliance" in a massive geopolitical shift resulting from devastating climate change. This speculative turn joins everything from fabulism to folk tale as Arimah confidently tests out all the tools in her kit while also managing to create a wholly cohesive and original collection. Heralds a new voice with certain staying power.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Arimah, Lesley Nneka: WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234676&it=r&asid=7245b9be4190be6dfad42dee7c8e7c1f. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234676

Lesley Nneka Arimah's debut story collection is vibrant and fresh

Tayla Burney
(Apr. 13, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
Byline: Tayla Burney
Lesley Nneka Arimah's debut short-story collection, "What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky," is an impressive showcase of her talent. Packed with a dozen stories that run from fables and fairy tales to near-future dystopias, her book focuses on family, either in African communities abroad or among members of the diaspora in the United States.
Arimah's voice is vibrant and fresh, her topics equally timely and timeless. On Twitter, she describes herself as "Nigerian . . . ish," and her stories bring us to different parts of Nigeria, across nowhere-in-particular America, into homes that are grand and into the lives of those with no fixed address.
The title story imagines a too-near-future world where flooding has brought on a refugee crisis of epic proportions, driving home the consequences of ignoring climate change. In that world, religion, which so divides us at present, has been abandoned and replaced by a mathematical formula. This arithmetic allows for the removal of sorrows by gifted mathematicians who can "fix the equation of a person." But as we gain a glimpse into one of their lives, we wonder at the cost of such relief brought on by abstraction and the burden created for those doing the math.
Another tale, "Who Will Greet You at Home" feels like a fable handed down by generations until it was finally captured on paper. It imagines a culture in which women must protect a faux child for a year before they give birth to their own. In desperation, after the unraveling and destruction of several attempts at a child, one woman does the forbidden: She makes her child out of the hair of others. The results are haunting and will cause you to reflect on the place children take in our minds when they are wished for but slow to come, if they ever arrive.
Indeed, mothers and daughters, aunts and sisters are central to this collection. In some stories, their relationships will break your heart. "Windfalls," a story about women just getting by in America with a mix of deception and desperation, feels raw and true. It's difficult to read and yet impossible to turn away.
This is a slim, rare volume that left me compelled to press it into the hands of friends, saying, "You must read this." But resist the urge to make your way through its pages at a rapid clip. Each story here benefits from reflection before you tackle the next.
Tayla Burney is events manager at WAMU, where she curates WAMU Books.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Burney, Tayla. "Lesley Nneka Arimah's debut story collection is vibrant and fresh." Washingtonpost.com, 13 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA489557958&it=r&asid=c2d3ec4ec2d812c2cb2f86034a69c6fe. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A489557958

Seaman, Donna. "What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 21. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA490998426&asid=407c0b126a2658326c5d230ee02c2dd1. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017. "What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky." Publishers Weekly, 27 Feb. 2017, p. 72. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA485671150&asid=075ccac3488669793fc81d6e6d3b2a52. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017. "Arimah, Lesley Nneka: WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA479234676&asid=7245b9be4190be6dfad42dee7c8e7c1f. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017. Burney, Tayla. "Lesley Nneka Arimah's debut story collection is vibrant and fresh." Washingtonpost.com, 13 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA489557958&asid=c2d3ec4ec2d812c2cb2f86034a69c6fe. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.

• Atlantic
  https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/the-powerful-pessimism-of-what-it-means-when-a-man-falls-from-the-sky/522687/
  Word count: 1154

  The Powerful Pessimism of What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky
  Lesley Nneka Arimah’s debut story collection takes a dystopic look at human life, but pulls back from the brink of total bleakness.

  Diego Main / Getty

  Amy Weiss-Meyer Apr 11, 2017 Culture
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  In a recent interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Scott Simon spoke to Lesley Nneka Arimah days before the publication of her highly anticipated debut story collection. Why, he asked, did she think post-apocalyptic worlds hold so much interest for today’s readers? The answer she gave suggests her own fascination has as much to do with temperament as with our particular times. “At some point, we all know deep down that we’re doomed. And so I think we’re just sort of imagining the futures that are coming,” Arimah said, calling herself  “a pessimist. I do think that human nature has sort of proven time and time again that we will indulge our baser impulses.”
  In What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, her new book, dark turns come in many forms, from the fantastic to the grimly realistic. Arimah sets her fiction in Nigeria (where she spent part of her childhood) and in the U.S. (one of the many places in the world where she has lived)—in the present and in the imagined future. In “What Is A Volcano?,” she evokes a mythic domain of feuding gods. She delivers affecting accounts of parent-child struggles, and sketches surrealist scenarios in which dolls come to life and the dead haunt the living. An undertow of grief pulls hard on all of the book’s tales, most of which feature characters who are in some way bereft—usually missing one parent. The family members who stick around are quite often cruel to one another. At the very least, they are afraid to show anything like kindness. Heartbreak and vulnerability are the common threads.
  Related Story

  The Lucky Ones Is No Ordinary Coming-of-Age Novel
  Arimah is particularly interested in generational rifts. Warnings go unheeded by young and old, and the best laid plans are defied; adolescent rebellion yields harsh punishment. A mother slaps her daughter, insisting she avoid a man from a bad family; the daughter disobeys, and ends up enduring abuse at his hands. When she returns home, “the reunion isn’t tender,” Arimah writes. “Bibi’s right eye is almost swollen shut and her mother’s mouth is pressed shut and they neither look at nor speak to each other.” An enraged uncle insists that his young niece’s favorite chicken be killed to spite her. When a girl complains of being sexually harassed by a youth minister, he calls her a liar, and her mother blames the end of her marriage on “the stink that was raised.” True to her word, Arimah sees baser impulses at work everywhere.  
  When Arimah leaves domestic reality behind, she pushes her pessimism further, dramatizing futile human efforts to believe that some transcendence is possible. She is drawn to magical realism, but not because it invites imaginative escape. On the contrary, it allows a writer, she has said, to “take a very human desire, insert it into a supernatural world, and watch humanity become grotesque.”

  The title story does just that. “What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky” takes place in a world ravaged by climate change and geopolitical conflict. As its inhabitants lament the plight (or the intrusion) of the refugees who’ve been displaced in the turmoil, many also take solace in a discovery that purports to ease all human woes. The “Formula,” as it is called, is an infinite string of numbers that appears to explain everything in the universe. Mathematicians like the story’s protagonist, Nneoma, specialize in manipulating it to “fix the equation of a person”—they can “calculate” things like pain and “negative emotions” and then, through an obscure mental process, undo them. A few attempt to use it to achieve the ultimate release from the bonds of the earth: “The bravest” mathematicians, Nneoma says, “have tried their head at using the Formula to make the human body defy gravity, for physical endeavors like flight.”
  Arimah’s writing conveys respect for the people who claw their way through relentlessly difficult lives.
  That’s how the eponymous man wound up in the sky, and his fall gives rise to fears that the Formula contains fundamental flaws—perhaps, rather than giving order to life, it leads to death. As Nneoma reckons with her own misplaced faith in the Formula and its awesome powers, Arimah explores the dystopian consequences of the human yearning for the illusory quick-fix. (The story is explicit about the parallels to religion: “For many the Formula was God, misunderstood for so long.”) If it all sounds a bit contrived, the moral heavy-handed, that’s because it is. True redemption isn’t really an option, and the myth magnifies the message.

  But the best stories in the book plumb the depths of human desire and delusions without magic. In “Windfalls,” a mother-daughter pair stumbles their way—literally—through a hostile world. They make intentional slips and falls look like someone else’s fault, and then survive on the profits of personal injury suits and the sympathy of strangers (sometimes induced by “the embarrassing last resort of offering a blow job”). The story’s first lines are disquieting in their tender revelation of a child exposed to routine violence: “The first time you fell, you were six. Before then, you were too young to fall and had to be dropped, pushed, made to slip for the sake of authenticity. … You have been living off these falls for years.” The very plausibility of that twisted proposition gives “Windfalls” its surreal force. The story sustains a provocative tension between the cynical abuse and the parental urge to provide for a child. “Baby,” the mother says to her ever-loyal daughter after one of her falls, “I’m so proud of you.”
  A spirit of willful perseverance suffuses Arimah’s collection, too, and pulls it back from the brink of total bleakness. Above all, her writing conveys respect for the people who claw their way through relentlessly difficult lives. “When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world,” the story “Light” opens, “he did not know what the world did to daughters.” His story and others reveal that it doesn’t take an apocalypse—even if readers these days apparently expect one—to make us face up to darkness within and without. These tales don’t celebrate virtue, but they pay tribute to tenacity.

• London Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/02/what-it-means-when-man-fallsfrom-the-sky-lesley-nneka-arimah-review
  Word count: 911

  What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah review – short stories

  A debut collection which ranges from the fantstical to the domestic, but always rooted in human need and longing

  Lesley Arimah draws on realism, myth and fable in her short stories. Photograph: Emily Baxter

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  KJ Orr
  Saturday 2 September 2017 09.59 BST
  Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 10.26 BST
  O
  ne of the pleasures of reading Lesley Nneka Arimah’s debut collection is the feeling of being thrown off balance: not knowing where this playful and adventurous new talent will take you next. The 12 stories that make up What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky are set in Nigeria and the US, sometimes moving between the two (the author was born in the UK, has lived in Nigeria and is now based in the States). Arimah’s focus is on the lives of girls and women, and while her perspective is often bleak, the collection is bracing and varied.
  Here is a debut writer showing serious range – drawing on realism, magical realism, the fantastic and speculative, myth and fable. In the title story, Nneoma, a “grief worker” in a post-apocalyptic future, possesses the power to draw grief and sadness out of people “like poison from a wound”. In “Second Chances”, a young woman’s mother returns from the dead, opening up the possibility of a longed-for reconciliation and forgiveness. In “Who Will Greet You at Home” a childless woman working in a hair salon makes herself a baby out of human hair. While the scenarios that Arimah depicts are at times fantastical, they are always rooted in human need and longing.
  Short story roundup – prison, pregnancy and the pain of adolescent sexuality
  The latest crop of short stories offers visceral truths from a range of viewpoints
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  The seam of bleakness running through the book concerns the diminishment of women: an outcome which starts to appear almost inevitable, even for girls born brave and quick-witted with a “streak of fire”. The story “Light”, a tender portrayal of a father-daughter relationship, opens: “When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better parts.” In one quietly heart-breaking line, his daughter “becomes aware that the world requires something other than what she is”.
  Arimah explores women’s dispossession from many angles, including the fraught relationships between mothers and daughters and the complicated dynamics of female friendship. In “Redemption”, a young servant, Mayowa, who “walked as though the earth spun to match her gait”, is punished for her audacity. In “Wild”, two cousins are rebuked by their mothers for bad behaviour: both struggle with the consequences of their boldness as they try to find their place in the world. In “Buchi’s Girls”, a daughter once thought of by her father as a hard diamond becomes reduced to “a jumpy mouse” when his death leaves the family dependant on others.

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  Arimah keeps her readers on their toes, and the disorientation can come with great rewards. While at times her use of narrative or rhetorical devices brings a degree of self-consciousness to the page, it also brings energy, momentum and humour. Some stories hold readers at a distance; others address them directly; some pull them close into the physical and emotional realms of the characters – and some of the stories do all of these at once. Overall, the collection offers a rare combination of daring and nuance.
  Short stories can cover unexpected distances in a brief space of time – and at best, in this collection, the effect can be striking. In “War Stories”, inflections of humour are superseded as the story takes an increasingly troubled course. The passage of time is compressed as a father’s accounts of traumatic experiences as a young soldier sit alongside his 12-year-old daughter’s recent experiences at school, with the juxtaposition of these elements carrying real charge. In “The Future Looks Good”, Arimah telescopes time as she explores history in a very different way, presenting the dizzying stream of past events and family history that have led a young woman, Ezinma, towards the moment they will catch up with her. Here, and elsewhere, Arimah captures a sense of time and change as chaotic, fast and unsparing – slippery, and out of our hands.

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  She is also skilled at stopping time, and allowing the reader, along with her characters, to dwell: offering the consolation that can come with getting lost in a moment, and paying attention to something or someone as vivid, insistent and vital as the unnamed girl in “Light” who, winning in a board game against her father, delights him as she “crows in a very unladylike way and yells, In your face!”
  • What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is published by Headline. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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