A personal and powerful essay from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of 'Americanah' and 'Half of a Yellow Sun', based on her 2013 TEDx Talk of the same name.
From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today - written as a letter to a friend. A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie''s letter of response. Here are fifteen invaluable suggestions-compelling, direct, wryly funny, and perceptive-for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. From encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, makeup, and sexuality; debunking the myth that women are somehow biologically arranged to be in the kitchen making dinner, and that men can "allow" women to have full careers, Dear Ijeawele goes right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century. It will start a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years (Baltimore Sun), with prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes (The Boston Globe); The Washington Post called her the twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe. Her award-winning Half of a Yellow Sun became an instant classic upon its publication three years later, once again putting her tremendous gifts--graceful storytelling, knowing compassion, and fierce insight into her characters hearts--on display. Now, in her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.
In A Private Experience, a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears shes been pushing away. In Tomorrow is Too Far, a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brothers death. The young mother at the center of Imitation finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to reexamine them.
Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichies signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers.
BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah.
