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What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
"Mothers bargain with gods, girls outgrow the futures chosen for them, and a mathematician learns to calculate grief itself. These incandescent stories slide from the uncanny to the intimate, revealing worlds that feel both startling and true. What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is a dazzling collection that rewires the heart."
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In What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, did you enjoy ...
... surreal, uncanny fabulism that bends everyday womanhood into nightmare-logic the way hair-woven babies and grief-math do?
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
If the way Arimah makes the ordinary tilt into the uncanny grabbed you—like the woman crafting a child from hair in “Who Will Greet You at Home,” or the literal calculus of sorrow in the title story—you’ll love the way Her Body and Other Parties warps familiar realities. Machado’s tales turn urban legends and relationships inside out, delivering the same eerie charge and emotional bite you felt when Arimah’s domestic spaces suddenly sprouted teeth.
... humane, idea-driven SF where technology refracts grief and memory like Arimah’s mathematicians who compute away pain?
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
You responded to the way Arimah weds big ideas to intimate heartbreak—think of the grief “removers” in “What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky.” Ken Liu does that too: in stories like “The Paper Menagerie” and “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species,” the speculative conceits illuminate loss, love, and cultural inheritance, delivering heady concepts with the same emotional wallop that made Arimah’s title story linger.
... razor-sharp, self-contained stories that each land like a gut punch while sketching a larger social portrait?
Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
If you liked how Arimah’s collection hits in concentrated bursts—jumping from “The Future Looks Good” to “Redemption” to “Buchi’s Girls,” each story a complete, searing world—Friday Black offers that same short-form intensity. Adjei-Brenyah’s pieces, like “The Finkelstein 5,” pair surreal escalations with social critique, echoing the way Arimah’s standalones blend intimate stakes with cultural pressure.
... fiercely capable young African heroines balancing tradition with a startlingly new future?
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
If you were drawn to the determined girls and women in “Wild,” “Glory,” and “Buchi’s Girls,” you’ll click with Binti—a brilliant Himba girl who leaves home for an interstellar university. Like Arimah’s protagonists, she negotiates family expectation and personal ambition, and when conflict explodes, her resourcefulness and compassion drive the story’s heart the way Arimah’s heroines do.
... African-set speculative fiction interrogating colonial legacies and how they ripple into a tech-lit future?
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
If the social undercurrents in “War Stories” and the power tensions threaded through Arimah’s collection stuck with you, Serpell’s The Old Drift widens that lens across generations in Zambia—moving from colonial schemes to mosquito drones and bio-tech. It channels the same critique of inherited systems and their personal costs that you felt humming beneath Arimah’s most charged stories.
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