Of Africa

Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka peers into Africa's past and speculates about the continent's future. Though he complains it has been exalted and abused, overlooked and misapprehended, exploited and overstuffed with false charity, Soynika remains optimistic, full of a kind of rational spirituality, and predicts that Africa's best days yet lie ahead.

June 19: On this day in 1816, the Shelleys, Lord Byron, and entourage gathered at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva to tell the ghost stories that would trigger Frankenstein. This most legendary of storm-tossed evenings inspired…

Very few debut novels exhibit the charm, assurance, emotional depth and bravura fabulation which the lucky reader will discover in Helene Wecker's

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