Before her 19th birthday, Helen Oyeyemi had already written the highly acclaimed novel The Icarus Girl, a story about folklore and childhood portrayed “not through the distancing lens of time, but as scary and magical as it really was” (San Francisco Chronicle). Her follow-up, The Opposite House, uses Cuban mythology as means to explore truth, faith, and the thin wall between myth and reality. 2009’s White is for Witching, winner of a Somerset Maugham Award and a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, spins the “unconventional, intoxicating and deeply disquieting” (Publishers Weekly) gothic tale of an old house and a teenaged girl who share equally bizarre and increasingly ravenous appetites. Boy, Snow, Bird revisits the classic story of Snow White through the prism of a young mother’s experiences with race and family in wintry 1950s Massachusetts. 

In his “superb” and “gritty” (The New Internationalist) debut novel Arrows of Rain, Okey Ndibe garnered acclaim for his dissection of the relationship between the individual and the larger politics of the modern African state. A journalist and magazine editor in his native Nigeria, Ndibe has taught at several universities, including Trinity College, Brown University, and the University of Lagos as a Fulbright scholar. A founding editor of the esteemed African Commentary magazine, he has contributed articles, poems, stories, and essays to a number of domestic and international publications. Foreign Gods, Inc. tells the tale of an immigrant cab driver’s struggles with American culture, and the choices he makes that lead toward an “inexorable and ineffably sad” (Kirkus Reviews) reckoning.