Love is Power or Something Like That

A phenomenal short story collection of talent and range from a writer to watch

One of the finest writers around… Known for the raw energy of his prose and characters that feel alive on the page, I encourage you to put this on your list of must-reads for 2013

Barrett's artful, unsparing and unsentimental stories confirm the arrival of a major talent.

It left me in tears. He is the most exciting writer producing right now. He has an incredible range, a unique voice, and has the power to move.

A. Igoni Barrett is a writer who has succeeded in making colloquial literature without seeking spurious attention by vulgar daring. Here is a reader’s entry to hearing on the page how contemporary communication, not only in his Nigeria, can be inventive. Love Is Power, or Something Like That is, to paraphrase its title: something alive, like that

Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Booker and Nobel Prize for Literature

A. Igoni Barrett does for Lagos what Chekhov did for Saint Petersburg and what Joyce did for Dublin, namely, to give a real face to a place that is too often maligned or mythologized

Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Rails Under My Back and Holding Pattern

A bewitching juxtaposition of the grotesque and uplifting, rotten and humane

Michela Wrong, author of It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower

Barrett captures both the quotidian and the elevated with a gaze that is as relentless as it is sympathetic. Here’s a writer to watch

Brilliant, unforgettable, violent, compassionate

Carolyn Cooke, author of Daughters of the Revolution

In these nine blistering stories cavort jealous husbands, kissing cousins, teenage internet hustlers, democratic bus rides, home exorcisms and bowls of dubious catfish peppersoup: this is a searing, savage portrait of an utterly modern Nigeria. 
 
Dark yet disarming, in prose that is tough, vigorous and immediately distinctive, Love is Power, Or Something Like That is a phenomenal short story collection from a palpably talented new writer.

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency.

Dark yet disarming, Love is Power, Or Something Like That is a phenomenal short story collection. 
 
Where sex is a currency, or a weapon. 
 
Where power ends in corruption, or violence. 
 
Where the worst thing to happen is for the best, sometimes. 
 
Where love is power, or something like that. 
 
In these nine blistering stories cavort jealous husbands, kissing cousins, teenage internet hustlers, democratic bus rides, home exorcisms and bowls of dubious catfish peppersoup: this is a searing, savage portrait of an utterly modern Nigeria.

A. Igoni Barrett

With this hilarious, nail-pointed satire, a devastating social parable brimming with humanity and heart, Barrett joins the ranks of the great tricksters: Alain Mabanckou, Joseph Heller and Charles Johnson

Marlon James, winner of the Booker Prize 2015

It is the funniest, most engaging badass book I’ve read in years. You should read this book and enjoy freshly minted scintillating prose rioting with each other – it is a lush canvas of ideas, humor and vision. Blackass is fresh, contemporary writing without even trying; this is how fiction should be written in the 21st century.

Gripping... This is a memorable, richly allusive story, skillfully interweaving thoughts from Kafka to the poet Elizabeth Bishop. Barrett probes not only the surface but the depths of who we are

Wonderfully imagined, and very funny… a dazzling first novel by one of Africa’s best young writers

As well as being a fable about race and identity, Blackass is in large part a love letter to Lagos… For Barrett, race is inevitably one part of a person’s identity, but it is one that asserts itself principally through the eyes of others, through how they “read” those they encounter. People will inevitably discuss this book, and Barrett’s work in general, in the context of a resurgent Nigerian literary scene that includes writers such as Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Helon Habila. But, to read him only as a Nigerian writer would be to do him a disservice. For Blackass is a strange, compelling novel, and Barrett has something to tell us all.

A bold riff on Kafka’s Metamorphosis... Igoni Barrett’s greatest asset is his ability to satirise the ridiculous extents people, especially Lagosians, go to in order to appear important. His characters’ every foible is captured and amplified for effect.

An inventive and playful take on power and identity in modern Nigeria... [with] nods to Achebe and Yeats

A highly original story about selfishness, inequality and perceptions

A confident, original and occasionally laugh-out-loud-funny novel which may have an agenda but is certainly not hijacked by it

A suitably surreal cocktail of Kafka, Lagos life and Nigerian wit

A really interesting and different novel from many of the things I have read, or have seen published, this year. You can simply read it as a darkly witty escapist fairytale/myth/fable or you can or as a wonderful, satirical and occasionally daring way to look at society and questions of class, gender and race. Either way you are going to have a great read ahead of you

Barrett’s novel forces the reader to consider important questions regarding the human condition and is a worthwhile read precisely because of the difficult questions it raises.

Barrett reworks Kafka’s family drama as an urban odyssey and make a stunning success of it.

'A devastating social parable brimming with humanity and heart...' Marlon James 
 
White skin, green eyes, red hair... BLACKASS 
 
Furo Wariboko - born and bred in Lagos - wakes up on the morning of his job interview to discover he has turned into a white man. As he hits the city streets running, still reeling from his new-found condition, Furo finds the dead ends of his life open out before him. As a white man in Nigeria, the world is seemingly his oyster - except for one thing: despite his radical transformation, Furo's ass remains robustly black . . . 
 
Funny, fierce, inventive and daringly provocative - this is a very modern satire, with a sting in the tail.

A. Igoni Barrett

Praise for Blackass

With this hilarious, nail-pointed satire, a devastating social parable brimming with humanity and heart, Barrett joins the ranks of the great tricksters: Alain Mabanckou, Joseph Heller and Charles Johnson

It is the funniest, most engaging badass book I’ve read in years. You should read this book and enjoy freshly minted scintillating prose rioting with each other – it is a lush canvas of ideas, humor and vi ...

Gripping... This is a memorable, richly allusive story, skillfully interweaving thoughts from Kafka to the poet Elizabeth Bishop. Barrett probes not only the surface but the depths of who we are

With this hilarious, nail-pointed satire, a devastating social parable brimming with humanity and heart, Barrett joins the ranks of the great tricksters: Alain Mabanckou, Joseph Heller and Charles Johnson

It is the funniest, most engaging badass book I’ve read in years. You should read this book and enjoy freshly minted scintillating prose rioting with each other – it is a lush canvas of ideas, humor and vi ...

Gripping... This is a memorable, richly allusive story, skillfully interweaving thoughts from Kafka to the poet Elizabeth Bishop. Barrett probes not only the surface but the depths of who we are

With this hilarious, nail-pointed satire, a devastating social parable brimming with humanity and heart, Barrett joins the ranks of the great tricksters: Alain Mabanckou, Joseph Heller and Charles Johnson

It is the funniest, most engaging badass book I’ve read in years. You should read this book and enjoy freshly minted scintillating prose rioting with each other – it is a lush canvas of ideas, humor and vi ...

Gripping... This is a memorable, richly allusive story, skillfully interweaving thoughts from Kafka to the poet Elizabeth Bishop. Barrett probes not only the surface but the depths of who we are

Books by A. Igoni Barrett

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