African Short Stories edited by Chinua Achebe and C. L. Innes
Introduction African Short Stories, selected and edited by the legendary Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe and the prominent scholar C. L. Innes, was first published in 1985 in the Heinemann African Writers Series (AWS 270). The anthology serves as a curated map of the rich, diverse, and rapidly evolving landscape of modern African short fiction. In compiling these twenty stories from across the continent, Achebe and Innes aimed to present a collection of high literary merit that would appeal to the general reader while offering a manageable, engaging introduction to the art and world of African fiction. Deconstructing the “Native” Genre Fallacy In his introduction to the anthology, Chinua Achebe takes direct aim at the paternalistic assertions of certain Western literary critics. He refutes the “silly notion” that the short story is a genre inherently native to Africa and therefore strong while the novel is an alien form and therefore weak. Achebe argues that while both the novel and the short story in Africa undoubtedly draw from a rich, common oral heritage, each has achieved its own formal distinctiveness in the hands of its best practitioners. The modern short story, Achebe asserts, is a highly sophisticated, technically demanding modern form of …