what is not yours is not yours by helen oyeyemi

Other works, such as 'Dornicka and the St. and seems to fill or absorb the air around it.' As she copies down purloined information, the black ink in her pen turns violet, and the journal begins to unfold on its own so that it's 'sitting upright. In the wryly titled 'If a Book Is Locked There's Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think,' the narrator discovers the price for invading privacy when she forces open a sealed diary. Built around the idea of keys, locks and magic doors, the stories cover a wide territory - from mythology and fairy tales to smartphones and YouTube stars.

The idol seems untouchable until he's hexed into doing public penance on the Internet by a conjure woman, with only the very faintest connection to that house.Helen Oyeyemi's first collection of short fiction, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (Riverhead, $27), is a series of loosely connected, magically tinged tales about personal and social justice. For instance, what promises on page one to be a tale of a house askew, rambles off into another story altogether about a broken-hearted young girl disillusioned with her pop idol who's been exposed as a violent abuser of women. The waywardness of that house - the refusal of those doors and windows to click into place - mimics the sinister waywardness of Oyeyemi's storytelling style. A golden chain with a key is fastened around the baby's neck - the key to her identity, perhaps?Īnother story, called, ''Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea,' opens in 'The House of Locks,' - an off-kilter cottage where none of the doors or windows can be closed without force. In the opening tale, 'Books and Roses,' a dark-complexioned baby is abandoned beneath a statue of a Black Madonna in a monk's chapel in Catalonia. Whether they unlock a door or a diary or a nightmare, keys propel Oyeyemi's narratives further into the twilight zone. The single clue that leads a reader through the labyrinth of this collection is the presence of keys in every one of the nine stories here. But, even the most baffling stories in Oyeyemi's new collection, called What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, leave a deep impression - like a scar that stubbornly refuses to fade. They seem deliberately designed to make a reader feel. Her nouveau Gothic stories are 'out there': long and winding, set in surreal landscapes, and elaborately peopled with ghosts, goddesses and grinning puppets. She's kin to the uncanny likes of Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson and Jeanette Winterson, whose names trail down the back covers of her books like a pagan invocation. Helen Oyeyemi is one of literature's weird sisters. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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What is not yours is not yours by helen oyeyemi