PRAISE STRANGER FACES

"Wise, warm, witty and dizzyingly wide-ranging... Stranger faces refuse to signify or symbolize, which may be exactly why we try so hard to read them—and why it is so fun to read about them, at least when Serpell is doing the writing."—The New York Times

“Serpell can reanimate any subject, be it Hitchcock or emojis, and her bright, brainy collection is a model for how to surface the fun in a critical question.”—The New Yorker

“Serpell delivers a brilliant essay collection that, informed by semiotics, proposes a way of thinking about the human face that views each person’s countenance as possessed of culturally and individually constructed meaning that can change radically according to the beholder... Serpell’s vital treatise is one readers will find themselves returning to again and again."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Highly intellectual scholarship that casts a smart yet playful eye on pop culture as well as literary theory.”—The Boston Globe

PRAISE FOR NAMWALI SERPELL

“Extraordinary, ambitious, evocative… The Old Drift is an impressive book, ranging skillfully between historical and science fiction, shifting gears between political argument, psychological realism and rich fabulism… a dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage.” —SALMAN RUSHDIE, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (cover)

“This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade. It made the skin on the back of my neck prickle.” —DWIGHT GARNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Namwali Serpell’s vibrant, intellectually rich debut novel, The Old Drift… refuses to conform to expectations. . . . This oddball cast of characters simply represents the joys of the picaresque novel, in which the author’s set design is intentionally surreal and ironic. . . . Serpell is a natural social novelist, capable of conjuring a Dickensian range of characters with a painterly eye for detail. . . . [A] clear-eyed, energetic and richly entertaining novel.” —THE WASHINGTON POST

“There are moments of such heart-wrenching poignancy that I had to put the book down several times and recompose myself. Serpell writes with the emotional maturity and sardonic smile of one who has lived several times already. It is the reader’s great privilege to follow her strange and vivid characters from cradle to grave.” —THE SUNDAY TIMES

“Namwali Serpell's lush, sprawling new novel is a speculative history — and future — of Zambia…. To err also means to wander, and The Old Drift does, shamelessly: It does not acknowledge restraints of species or time or perspective or taste or page length. Like a mosquito swarm, the narrative hovers, drifts, and returns elliptically… sweeping in scope and gesture…. Serpell also performs exquisite acts of literary ventriloquism.” —NPR

“A heartbreaking epic of staggering creativity. In this wonderfully chaotic epic, Namwali Serpell invites us into an indelible world that’s part history, part sci-fi, totally political, and often as heartbreaking as it is weirdly hilarious.” —THE BOSTON GLOBE

“This is a founding epic in the vein of Virgil’s Aeneid, which provides the book’s epigraph, though in its sprawling size, its flavor of picaresque comedy and its fusion of family lore with national politics it more resembles Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children.’” —THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“Highly anticipated...a boldly sweeping epic... The singularly stunning achievement of [The Old Drift]: grappling with grandiose, complex notions, funneled through a kind of worldly knowledge and historical curiosity — all of which is ultimately grounded in an attention to the interiors of individual lives...Serpell’s vision has made The Old Drift among the most buzzed-about books of the year.” —THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“Namwali Serpell’s impressive first novel is an indulgent, centuries-spanning slab of life marbled with subplots, zigzagging between characters and decades to play snakes and ladders with the bloodlines of three Zambian families with roots from around the world.” —THE OBSERVER

“This ambitious first novel has the chutzpah to work on a vast canvas, extending from colonial times to Afrofuturism… Serpell is a writer to watch.” —THE GUARDIAN

“In a novel that spans the breadth of Zambia’s precolonial past to its digital future, Serpell’s unbound imagination is often a thing of beauty... It is in the familial space with its dramas of loves, betrayals, desires and dreams that she excels. Her Zambian characters are especially brimming and compelling. In a nod to Leo Tolstoy, she eventually offers her readers a lovely kernel of an overarching theme that binds her characters across the passage of time and encapsulates her confident writing style: ‘Every family is a war but some are more civil than others.’” —THE MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE

“Serpell’s command of the minutia of sentence craft, and her ability to balance that craft against this novel’s massive historical scale is thrilling. The Old Drift feels like entering a wormhole, where time is both slow enough for us to note the way a woman’s dress knocks a wine glass off balance as she walks by, and vast enough that we may see exactly how feeble, how ultimately incidental to human history, nations are.” —INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS, THE BELIEVER

PRODUCT INFO

First Published: October 20, 2020
(Undelivered Lectures Series)
Narrative Nonfiction
5 x 7 | 196 pages
Rights: World
978-1-945492-43-3 (paperback)
978-1-945492-47-1 (ebook)