Friday Finds

The Other Hand by Chris Cleave is shocking, exciting and deeply affecting in its evisceration of how one hideous event brings two alien cultures into collision: the lawless predation of an oil-frenzied corner of Nigeria, and the ordered suburbia of Kingston-upon-Thames.





Call Me Ahab by Anne Finger intricately embroiders vivid new lives for a range of characters from art and literature whose stories we think we already know. Captain Ahab, Goliath, Vincent Van Gogh, Helen Keller, Frida Kahlo, the dwarf from a Velazquez painting, and Shakespeare's Gloucester- all magically shift shapes, eras, and places in Anne Finger's astonishing and stirring prose. These elegant stories rewrite the lives of the unusually embodied, imbuing them with magic and depth to show us how we collectively misrecognize what it means to inhabit a body that looks and works apart from the ordinary.