Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others.
McConigley's new novel is How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.
Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:
I am reading two books right now at once. One is the background for a new writing project I am just starting,Visit Nina McConigley's website.Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia by Santilla Chingaipe. I haven’t written a lot of historical fiction, but this is connected to family ancestry, and so I am doing a deep dive to understand the slave trade and convicts in Australia. Especially women convicts. It makes me realize how narrow my view of history and place is. And how we are so taught the history of where we are from, and not the rest of the world.
I also just reread Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid. I am so curious about how characters get past the colonial past of their homeland with life in the United States. Can that ever happen? I also love first-person point- of-view books narrated by young women.
The Page 69 Test: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
