On One World

This is a good collection, though the stories vary in quality. It leans heavily into contemporary African short stories, which I was glad to see. The single best was probably the closing story, Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent,” which brought me to tears; I’d never read Lahiri before, and it was a fine introduction. Other standouts were Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “My Mother, the Crazy African,” Martin Ramos’s “The Way of the Machete,” Dipita Kwa’s “Honor of a Woman,” and Sequoia Nagamatsu’s “Melancholy Nights in a Tokyo Cyber Café,” while Ravi Mangla’s “Air Mail” and Vanessa Gebbie’s “The Kettle on the Boat” were especially touching. The collection is effective at gathering what’s universal across the world: abandonment, generational conflict, loneliness, gender inequality, discrimination. One thread running through many of the stories is a character forced into a hard decision, either to improve their life or to avoid punishment. It’s light reading, but thematically heavy, and that makes it all the more valuable.