![]() What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is her first batch of stories, and like the rest of her work it partakes promiscuously of mythology, fairy tale, and folklore without turning a blind eye to the modern perversities of smartphones, YouTube celebrities, and electronic cigarettes. Magic comes cheap in fiction, but with Oyeyemi, you get the sense that it’s in her writing because reality isn’t enough for her. “He was handsome but the scent of his cologne was one she very strongly associated with loan sharks,” she writes in “Drownings,” a story in her new collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. “Even so, can’t loan sharks also be caring boyfriends, or at the very least great in bed?” At the age of 31, Oyeyemi has published five much-laureled novels - beginning with The Icarus Girl, which she famously wrote in high school - and two plays. Her sentences have an elegance often set off by jolts of contemporary vernacular. A restless imagination harnessed to a smooth and propulsive prose style - Helen Oyeyemi’s fiction is a juggernaut, and she brakes for no one. ![]()
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