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A dazzling short story collection from the person Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls "one of the greatest writers of our time" Ngg wa Thiong'o, although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, honed his craft as a short story writer. From "The Fig Tree, " written in 1960, his first year as an undergraduate at Makerere University College in Uganda, to the playful "The Ghost of Michael Jackson," written as a professor at the University of California, Irvine, these collected stories reveal a master of the short form. Covering the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence - and including two stories that have never before been published in the United States - Ngg's collection features women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society, big men in their Bentleys who have inherited power from the British, and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden.