The Writer’s Center presents a FREE virtual chat about the craft of fiction! We’re joined by E.C. Osondu to discuss his award-winning story collection, Alien Stories. E.C. will be in conversation with Zach Powers, past winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize and Director of Communications at The Writer’s Center.
RSVP below to receive login information (our virtual events are held via Zoom). FREE and open to the public, all times Eastern.
We encourage you to order a copy of the book directly from the publisher or from your local, independent bookseller.
E.C. Osondu is the author of Alien Stories (BOA, 2021), which won the BOA Short Fiction Prize; Voice of America (HarperCollins, 2011); and the novel This House Is Not For Sale (HarperCollins, 2015). He is a winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Allen and Nirelle Galso Prize for Fiction, among other awards. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, AGNI, n+1, Guernica, Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, Zyzzyva, The Threepenny Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, New Statesman, and many other places, and his work has been translated into over half a dozen languages including Icelandic, Japanese, and Belarusian. He earned his MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a Syracuse University Fellow. He lives in Rhode Island and teaches at Providence College.
About the Book
Winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize
“A vital voice in the short story, telling us new truths with deep humanity.” –George Saunders
Celebrated Nigerian-born writer E.C. Osondu delivers a short-story collection of nimble dexterity and startling originality in his BOA Short Fiction Prize-winning Alien Stories.
These eighteen stories, each centered around an encounter with the unexpected, explore what it means to be an alien. With a nod to the dual meaning of alien as both foreigner and extraterrestrial, Osondu turns familiar science-fiction tropes and immigration narratives on their heads, blending one with the other to call forth a whirlwind of otherness.
With wry observations about society and human nature, in shifting landscapes from Africa to America to outer space and back again, Alien Stories breaks down the concept of foreignness to reveal what unites us all as ‘aliens’ within a complex and interconnected universe.