Japa and Other Stories [Paperback]

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.

These eight brutally beautiful stories are struck full of fragmented dreams, with highly developed thieves, misadventurers, and displaced characters all heaving through a human struggle to anchor themselves in a new home or sometimes a new reality. This book is about young Nigerian immigrants who bilocate, trek through the desert, become temporary Mormons, sneak through Russia, and yearn for new life in strange new territories that force them to confront what it means to search for a connection far from home.

Japa and Other Stories came out of a struggle Iheoma Nwachukwu faced when trying to orient himself in the United States of 2017 to 2021, when attitudes toward immigrants suddenly shifted. The Japa characters explored in this book are immigrants who have no plans to return to their home country—for voluntary reasons—although they retain a strong connection to home.

Stories that consider what it means to search for a connection far from homeJapa 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.

Japa and Other Stories is a triumph: funny and ruthless, about every variety of longing tl3,