The King of Limbo and Other Stories

With elegance and precision reminiscent of Alice Munro, and the probing, unsentimental eye for detail of A.M. Homes, Adrianne Harun displays a formidable talent for discovering the meaning in ordinary human suffering.In stories and styles ranging from the magic realism of "Lukudi", in which Nigerian foreign exchange student Natife -- a recurring character in the collection who adds an outsider's angle on events -- tries to apply his native wisdom to the problems of a friend whose pain he can barely begin to grasp, to the carefully modulated madness of "The Eighth Sleeper of Ephesus" (winner of the Nelson Algren Award) in which a recluse establishes a link to the outside world by writing angry letters to the editor of his estranged son's small town paper, to the gritty realistic portrait of domestic trauma in the title story, Adrianne Harun again and again displays a unique ability to view the world from a dazzling array of perspectives, and to transcend the facts of everyday situations to attain poetry and truth. In The King of Limbo and Other Stories, Adrianne Harun emerges as a consummate stylist and a writer to watch.