Unit 6: Selection Vocabulary 3

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—a parallel novel that takes Austen’s classic story of Regency-period family, marriage, and social dynamics, and interweaves a zombie apocalypse.

Chimamanda Adichie, a contemporary Nigerian author, published her story “Ghosts” in a collection titled The Thing Around Your Neck.

Because parallel novels often seek to tell stories from a new perspective, they can highlight voices that have traditionally been absent from the canon—either through the author’s voice or through the voice of a character who was marginalized in the original work.

Her work, Woolf suggested, would no doubt have been lost to obscurity if she even had the chance to write it at all.

Due in part to such advocacy, many agree that a wider range of exemplary works should be recognized in the canon and taught in school curriculums; however, debates continue about what exactly should be included in the canon, or whether the canon is even a useful construct at all.

I quite remember his incessant chatter while he drove me to work in those days; I remember, too, that he was fond of reading my newspapers, a practice I did not encourage.

There was an uncertainty about him, a diffidence that seemed alien, very unlike the man who so easily got people to act.

I felt that Ikenna deserved to be told more, or maybe that the tension had not quite abated...

I shook my head in that slow, side-to-side way that my people have perfected when referring to things of this sort, as if to say that the situation is, sadly, ineluctable.

It was a tacit agreement among all of us, the survivors of Biafra. Even Ebere and I, who had debated our first child’s name, Zik, for months, agreed very quickly on Nkiru: what is ahead is better.