IHEOMA NWACHUKWU is a fiction writer and poet. He has won fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Michener Center, and the Chinua Achebe Center. His work has been published in Ploughshares, the Southern Review, the Iowa Review, AGNI, Electric Literature, Crazyhorse, and other venues. Nwachukwu is an assistant professor at Eastern University and lives in Pennsylvania.

Japa and Other Stories is a brilliant collection of stories so ravishingly voiced that we inhabit African immigrants in the USA as if their souls were our own, allowing us to intensely share--as indeed we all share in our universal humanity--the yearning to find a self, an identity, a place in the universe. Iheoma Nwachukwu is a literary artist of the highest order.--Robert Olen Butler "author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain"

Japa and Other Stories is a triumph: funny and ruthless, about every variety of longing there is on this earth. Nwachukwu is a terrific chronicler of the human condition, across continents and also close up, and a writer of truly brilliant short stories.

--Elizabeth McCracken "author of The Hero of This Book"

Gorillas in Malaysia. U-Haul trucks in Utah. International soccer matches in Finland. What do these things have in common? These are just some of the props in Nwachukwu's Japa and Other Stories. This eclectic collection exceeds expectations--it not only reveals an untold Pynchonesque America rarely captured by African diaspora fiction in its Utah and Tallahassee settings but then returns to the mother continent paying homage in its seductive strangeness to Bolano in a Zanzibar and Equatorial Guinea like we've never seen before. Japa is a major delight of staggering ambition not only in its attempt to capture 'Nigerian-ness' but in testing story form at every turn.--Billy Kahora "author of The Cape Cod Bicycle War and Other Stories"

African identities are diverse in Iheoma Nwachukwu's haunting, award-winning collection. . . . Displaced souls are blown hither and thither, rootless, like bees that have lost their homing instinct, in the muscular, poignant diaspora short stories of Japa and Other Stories.--Elaine Chiew "Foreword"

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Pub date: 2024-09-01

Length: 168 pages