Exuberant storytelling full of wry comedy, dark history, and devastating satireâby the celebrated and original author of an Oprahâs Book Club selection, Say Youâre One of Them.
From a suspiciously cheap Hellâs Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship Ekong Udousoro is about to begin the opportunity of a lifetime: to learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent
epicenter. While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial underbellyâcallous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile neighbors, and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a
bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food.
Reckoning, at the same time, with the recent history of the devastating and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekongâs people were a minority of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes, Ekongâs life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated
strife. The great apartment deal wrangled by his editor turns out to be an illegal sublet crawling with bedbugs. The lights of Times Square slide off the hardened veneer of New Yorkers plowing past the tourists. A collective antagonism toward the âotherâ consumes
Ekongâs daily life. Yet in overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, Chinese American and Latino and African American, and in bonding with his true allies at work and advocating for healing back home, Ekong proves that there is still hope in sharing our stories.
Akpanâs prose melds humor, tenderness, and pain to explore the myriad ways that tribalisms define life everywhere, from the villages of Nigeria to the villages within New York City. New York, My Village is a triumph of storytelling and a testament to the lifesustaining power
of community across borders and across boroughs.