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May 27, 2024 | 
barnesandnoble.com | Isabelle McConville |Silvia Moreno-Garcia |Helen Oyeyemi |Zakiya Harris
Manderley and More: Gothic and Unnerving Reads “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” So begins the fated story of Rebecca, a staple novel in gothic literature, sweeping readers into a world of angst, suspense, and obsession. Along with the darkly romantic tale at its center, fans of Rebecca will note that the house itself, Manderley, acts as a character of its own.
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May 1, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Helen Oyeyemi |sarah resnick
Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel, Parasol against the Axe, opens with a playful monologue from its narrator, the city of Prague. Prague has recently found its way – ‘who knows how’ – into a WhatsApp group ‘set up as a safe space for sharing complaints about the capital city of Czechia’. ‘Some of the incidents referred to had taken place many years ago,’ it explains.
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Apr 9, 2024 | 
todayschronic.com | Tommy Orange |Helen Oyeyemi |Xochitl Gonzalez |Kristen Bateman
This year is shaping up to be a good one for book lovers.
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Apr 4, 2024 | 
newyorkfolk.com | James White |Helen Oyeyemi
Imagine a city of staggering, sometimes menacing beauty. Its history is bloody, but it carries on, becoming more mesmerizingly strange with each era. Now imagine that the city is sentient. It has agency and consciousness; it decides who gets to stay and who needs to leave. It’s both a physical place and an ambient spirit that constantly inhabits different forms; it can seduce a visitor and twist time backwards.
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Mar 23, 2024 | 
audiofilemagazine.com | Helen Oyeyemi
Dorje Swallow's performance of this metafiction centers this whirligig of a novel in which story begets story. His assured narration--in particular, his ability to do voices and accents and adapt his tone to whatever the scene--makes this audiobook marvelous to listen to. Hero Tojosoa ostensibly comes to Prague to join her friend, Sofie, for a weekend.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
electricliterature.com | Helen Oyeyemi |Hiroko Oyamada |David Boyd |Jo Lou
Skip to content Reading Lists Something is wrong in these books... but what is it?
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Mar 14, 2024 | 
zip06.com | Helen Oyeyemi
Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi Oyeyemi's books are a bit like Prague's paternoster elevators: rich in myth, racked with danger, and quite charming. Her imagination for the fantastic (golems, magic books, sexy mole-women) is matched by her vision for the endless kinks and configurations of human character. Read for pleasure and confusion (and book a ticket to Prague). Nora, R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison
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Mar 9, 2024 | 
bookreporter.com | Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi is one of those novelists whose every new publication feels like an Event with a capital “E.” Her legions of devoted fans won’t need my recommendation to convince them to pick up her self-assured latest. But if you’re a reader who loves playfully experimental fiction and haven’t yet encountered Oyeyemi’s oeuvre, might I suggest a trip to Prague by the pages of PARASOL AGAINST THE AXE? Prague becomes a character in the novel, as well as its setting and even a narrator.
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Mar 5, 2024 | 
bookshop.org | Helen Oyeyemi
Praise for Parasol Against the Axe A New York Times Editor's Choice Pick "Delightfully weird."-- TIME "An intimate, opulent portrait of Prague." --The Washington Post "A shape-shifting novel about the power of stories...Helen Oyeyemi is a literary pied piper -- her voice is the kind that readers gamely follow into the most bewildering and unnerving of situations...[H]er stock-in-trade has always been tales at their least domesticated; her concern lies in form and the unruly patterns and...
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Mar 4, 2024 | 
entertainment-mag.com | Helen Oyeyemi
Then there’s “Paradoxical Undressing,” which Hero begins reading to pass the time on her trip. It begins with a tale-within-a-tale about a nobleman in the 16th-century court of Rudolf II, but breaks off to address Hero personally. Other characters read stories that involve Jewish taxi dancers under German occupation in 1943, or fringe art on the city’s subways in 2016.
