Speak Gigantular

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Buy on Amazon Buy on Waterstones.com
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date 15 Nov 2016 | Archive Date 6 Apr 2017

Description

A startling debut short story collection from one of Britain's rising literary stars. These stories are captivating, erotic, enigmatic and disturbing. Irenosen Okojie's gift is in her understated humor, her light touch, her razor-sharp assessment of the best and worst of humankind, and her unflinching gaze into the darkest corners of the human experience.

Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian-British writer who has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Southbank Centre, and the Caine Prize and was Writer in Residence for TEDx East End. In 2015 the Evening Standard named her as one of the top debut novelists of the summer with for her novel Butterfly Fish.

A startling debut short story collection from one of Britain's rising literary stars. These stories are captivating, erotic, enigmatic and disturbing. Irenosen Okojie's gift is in her understated...


Available Editions

EDITION Paperback
ISBN 9781909762299
PRICE US$14.95 (USD)

Average rating from 26 members


Featured Reviews

Beguiling. I enjoyed this raw yet lyrical, brutal and powerful, sensual and magical collection of short stories. The writing draws you in and while not every story worked for me, I found myself always admiring the quality and craft of the language.

Was this review helpful?

This was a really interesting collection, full of surrealism and magic realism, but at the same time being poignant and relatable and so present in the current moment. Highly recommended.

Was this review helpful?

Speak Gigantular
by Irenosen Okojie
published by Jacaranda Books

My review:
Speak Gigantular is a fascinating collection of surreal, and sexually charged short stories from Irenosen Okojie. Strange and unexpected elements of nightmare and magic merge with everyday urban life and heighten the predominant themes of loneliness, alienation and mental breakdown. Set mainly in London, but with a few further afield these are narratives to dip into and enjoy.
In Animal Parts, the first story in this collection, Henri is born in Denmark with a long, grey tail, but it’s not until he is subject to months of graphic bullying that he realises ‘His mother had lied. He wasn’t special. He was cursed.’ The story builds to a shocking conclusion where his mother is forced to an act of savagery to make him socially acceptable.
Loneliness itself becomes a character in Footer where a woman succumbing to ‘the feeling of being worshipped, to a delicious, deviant unspooling attached to a man’s tongue flicking between her toes’ dates a series of foot fetishists. It’s only at the end that we find out there have been a ‘series of sexually motivated disappearances’ and that the woman is not all she seems.
Snapper details the relentless disintegration of a relationship that has begun after a road crash: ‘I was holding a bag of oxtail on Green Street at Upton Park when the accident happened.’ Cronenberg’s Crash came to mind as I read this story.
In this collection of unusual and imaginative stories Irenosen Okojie has created a language that is vigorous and exciting. Just a few feel as if they’re trying too hard to be quirky and strange and don’t justify their inclusion, but Speak Gigantular is a memorable set of stories that I would recommend to anyone interested in the continuing revitalisation of the British short story.
Biography:
Irenosen Okojie, winner of a Betty Trask Award 2016 for her debut novel Butterfly Fish, is a writer, curator and Arts Project Manager. She has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Southbank Centre, and the Caine Prize. Her writing has been featured in the Guardian and the Observer. She was a selected writer by Theatre Royal Stratford East and Writer in Residence for TEDx East End. In 2014, she was the Prize Advocate for the SI Leeds Literary Prize. She is a mentor for the Pen to Print project supported by publisher Constable & Robinson. She lives in east London.

Publisher:
Jacaranda Books is a relatively new publisher priding itself on ‘Promoting diversity from boardroom to bookshelf’. www.jacarandabooksartmusic.co.uk

Ali Thurm 30.12.16

Was this review helpful?

Library Thing

Was this review helpful?

I was lulled into a false sense of security by the first few pages of Irenosen Okojie’s Speak Gigantular; the prose was beautiful, captivating, at times raw and harrowing, and one of the opening stories, about a boy born with a tail, was intriguing. The ending, however, felt like the story had turned round and punched me in the face (in as positive a way as that metaphor can allow).
The same can be said for much of the rest of the collection. As I continued, I grew used to the feeling of having the carpet pulled out from under my feet, but was still unable to work out when, by whom and why it would happen and never did manage to orientate myself. I was constantly surprised, shocked, startled. It’s not often I find a book that really fulfils my favourite Kafka quote - “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us...A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” - and I’m overjoyed to have discovered this one.
This is a masterful collection of short stories; a myriad of voices and characters and situations rise and fall throughout - a man who robs banks dressed as a chicken, a woman pursued by countless reproductions of a photo of herself, ghosts of suicides wandering the Underground where they met their end, a woman with gills - realism and fantasy are woven together so tightly they lose their distinction altogether as the carefully crafted prose simultaneously casts light on a range of social issues such as race, gender, and disability.
Beguiling, enthralling, completely and utterly fascinating, this collection of stories chewed me up and spat me out over and over again...not that I’m complaining.

Was this review helpful?

Strange stories that often featured vivid visuals. More than tone poems, but not exactly plot-based.

Was this review helpful?

It really is true what they say about the universe: you ask and it delivers. Just when I was thinking I needed to find more BAME/ethnic minority (I hate both these terms but am forced to use them) writers from the UK, specifically from London, Irenosen Okojie's Speak Gigantular landed in my lap.

I don’t know why Amazon categorises this book as ‘erotica’, yes there was like ONE story about a foot fetish, but Speak Gigantular has many more layers. While I can immediately draw parallels to the work of Isabel Allende, Helen Oyeyemi and Angela Carter, it is SO much more. It is a weird and wacky collection of short stories with elements of magic realism, feminism, erotica overlaid with a big chunk of horror. Okojie has managed wildly diverse but well developed characters ranging from vigilante chickens, serial killing women and ghosts that haunt the Victoria line.

What is this book about?

A startling debut short story collection from one of Britain's rising literary stars. These stories are captivating, erotic, enigmatic and disturbing. Irenosen Okojie's gift is in her understated humour, her light touch, her razor-sharp assessment of the best and worst of humankind, and her unflinching gaze into the darkest corners of the human experience…Sexy, serious and at times downright disturbing, this brilliant collection sizzles with originality.

For me a writer is someone that writes to reach out to people. I cannot underestimate the importance of a book, a paragraph or a line that sparks a light of recognition in them with someone somewhere and makes them feel loved and less lonely. Okojie’s book does this in so many ways, it is a beautiful work of that blends together race, gender, the city and so much more. But I want to draw on three things that struck a cord with me:

1.Normality

The word ‘normal’ is as good as a curse word to me. It is used to draw boundaries and put you back in your box. Okojie’s book, and especially her female leads, is a slap in the face of normality and it’s champions. The book is aptly dedicated to ‘all the misfits who dare to tilt worlds’.

Through the ‘genre’ or style of magic realism Okojie highlights the challenges of dealing with the rigidity of social niceties and boundaries. Many of her stories feature characters who have visions, who realise the fragility of seemingly solid things such as time, space, identities and above all ‘normality’. From murderous women, women who saw ghosts, women who were ghosts and even to teleporting vigilante chicken her characters had one thing in common; they weren’t normal, they were extraordinary. I loved this.

2.Horror and Race

Although I can’t sit through any horror film, I find it really interesting as a tool that brings back control to the ‘diverse’ reader. The blog Graveyard Shift Sisters[1], talks about how horror challenges the ‘strong black woman’ stereotype, subverts it and highlights the multiplicity of WoC. One such story in the Speak Gigantular collection is the alternative love story of October and Haji, two ghosts stuck in eternity in the bowel of London’s Tube network. Reading this book on the tube, I looked up a couple of times to see if they were staring at me through the glass. The MC, October’s journey to her afterlife shows her as a struggling actor and moves away from the stoic and all suffering image of WoC normalised in the media.

3.Bad Women

There were also some straight up messed up, evil, villainous women in Speak. Many times I physically wanted to recoil from the characters and their psychopathic antics, but I loved the way this challenges our notion of the feminine. Taking this back to horror, Modelski [2] points out that women are often constructed as symbols of ‘specious good’, so that this same image can later be the victim of horror. By subverting the genre and presenting women as perpetrators of horror Okojie has granted women the power to perform the full range of the human emotions – the good bad and the ugly. I was surprised by the extent of Okojie’s deviant imagination which featured female serial killers who slept with their victims before killing them and cute grannies that drugged and abducted oblivious trick-or-treaters; these women dropped kicked the sugar and spice and everything nice symbolisation of women as nurturing maternal figures only.

This is a beautiful book with something in it for everybody. Read Before You Die.

Was this review helpful?

Featuring men in chicken costumes, grown women with imaginary friends, romantic partners picked from a garden, Speak Gigantular is an iccentric read told with real verve. Okojie has a knack for heartfelt stories full of real weirdness.

Was this review helpful?

Readers who liked this book also liked: