In Conversation: Three Debut Authors on Fantasy & Identity

Brenda Peynado is a Dominican American writer of fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. Her fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, and more than 40 other journals. Her first book, The Rock Eaters: Stories (Penguin Books), is threaded with magic. The collection explores what it means to cross borders and break down walls, personally and politically. In them, suburban families perform oblations to cattle-like angels who live on their roofs, inhabitants of an unnamed dictatorship slowly lose their own agency as pieces of their bodies go missing, and an old woman disappears completely among the objects she has hoarded. The Washington Post called it a “genre-bending sociopolitical commentary with prose that shines.”

Nana Nkweti is a Caine Prize finalist and alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has garnered fellowships from MacDowell, Kimbilio, Ucross, and the Wurlitzer Foundation, among others, and she is also a professor of English at the University of Alabama. In her debut collection, Walking on Cowrie Shells: Stories (Graywolf Press), she draws freely from mystery and horror stories, realism, myth, and graphic novels. She vaults past realism, upending genre expectations in a satirical romp about a jaded PR professional trying to spin a zombie outbreak in West Africa, and in a mermaid tale about a Mami Wata who forgoes her power by remaining faithful to the fisherman she loves. Nkweti skewers racial prejudice and international adoption in “It Takes a Village, Some Say,” a tale about a teenage girl who leverages her adoptive parents to fast-track her fortunes. And in “The Devil Is a Liar,” a pregnant pastor’s wife struggles with the collision of western Christianity and her mother’s traditional Cameroonian beliefs. The New York Times called it “raucous and thoroughly impressive. … Nkweti’s utterly original stories range from laugh-out-loud funny to heartbreaking and are often both.”

Vinod Busjeet was born in Mauritius, a multiracial island in the Indian Ocean. He holds degrees from Wesleyan University, New York University, and Harvard University, and spent 29 years in economic development, finance, and diplomacy, holding positions at World Bank and International Finance Corporation, and as a secondary school teacher in Mauritius. Silent Winds, Dry Seas: A Novel (Doubleday Books) is his debut. In it, Busjeet explores the intimate struggle for independence and success of Vishnu Bhushan, a young descendant of Indian indentured laborers in Mauritius. Through precise language, Busjeet conjures Mauritius’ spirit and rich life, even as its diverse peoples live under colonial rule. He weaves the hopes, love, and heartbreaking tragedies of Vishnu’s proud Mauritian family with the country’s turbulent path to gain independence. In the intimate moments of a boy’s life, he evokes the epic sweep of history. Edward P. Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World, observed that the “beauty of Busjeet’s splendid, often breathtaking book is, like the best stories of journeys to young adulthood, the precious and well-observed and heart-breaking details of day-to-day life.”