Each of the realistic worlds Billy Kahora brings us in the short stories and novella that make up The Cape Cod Bicycle War and Other Stories explores the tensions and transitions of characters moving between youthful folly and a precarious adulthood. In the title story, immigrant workers with varying ambitions work at a Wendy’s in wintry Cape Cod. Sharing one house, they must also share, or rather compete for, bicycles—crucial transportation—which are in short supply. In other stories, a young man caught between a broken family and political violence befriends an aged gorilla in a Nairobi zoo; a pastor struggles to come to terms with the arrest of his brother, who is suspected of terrorism; and a dissolute bank employee on a serious bender returns to work to face a review board. The Cape Cod Bicycle War and Other Stories is Billy Kahora’s long-awaited debut collection. Stories in this volume have appeared in Granta and McSweeney’s and have been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing.

An epic story of a Bedouin family’s survival and legacy amid their changing world in the unforgiving Sahara Desert. Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. The days of Ahmed and the other families in their nomadic freeg are ruled by the rhythms of changing seasons, the needs of his beloved camel herd, and the rich legends and stories that link his life to centuries of tradition. But Ahmed’s world is threatened—by the French colonizers just beyond the horizon, the urbanization of the modern world, and a drought more deadly than any his people have known. At first, Ahmed attempts to ignore these forces by concentrating on the ancient routines of herding life. But these routines are broken when a precious camel named Zarga goes missing. Saddling his trusted Laamesh, praying at the appointed hours, and singing the songs of his fathers for strength, Ahmed sets off to recover Zarga on a perilous journey that will bring him face to face with the best and the worst of humanity and test every facet of his Bedouin desert survival skills.

“This compilation of tales conforms to a simple Freudian fact: You're as crazy as you thought, but in good company.” —Bicycling Magazine Okay, so some of us might be a bit too attached to our bicycles. Outsiders may say this is “inappropriate” or “unnatural.” But most cyclists will agree that passionate, all-consuming bicycle love is a fine and glorious thing. Bicycles take us places, physically and metaphysically, we cannot go without them. They move us; they make us dizzy and giddy, exhilarated and exhausted. All athletes love their sport, but cycling has a fetishistic side to it—the love of this deceptively simple machine that allows you to silently float, race, climb, glide over the earth. It brings the rush of wind to your ears and the surge of force through your body as you lean into a turn. It brings you to the fields and woods and sunshine, moving down the open road. Its beauty and charisma are undeniable. These sixty-two personal tales of the many varieties of bicycle love range from dreamy reminiscences of childhood bikes to powerful, sometimes insane adult attachments to mountain bikes, road bikes, and tandems. They all celebrate the freedom of cycling, the elegance of the machine, and the beauty of the act. They tell of the strange and wonderful things a bicycle has brought to life, the relationships that bloom or fade under the bicycle’s influence, and the unforgettable places bicycles have brought us. Funny, revealing, and intensely emotional, these stories show the secret inner life of every cyclist.

Now in its sixth edition after 20 years in print, this definitive best-seller is the undisputed classic guide for the region. It features: -- biking tours that range in length from six to 40 miles, through magnificent shoreline, island scenery, and quaint seaside cities and towns; -- four brand-new rides in the Bourne-Falmouth-Hyannis triangle region not formerly represented.

Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twenty-seven artists, scholars, and writers to trace Nairobi’s becoming. Methodologically experimental and multimodal, it seeks to balance an appreciation of Nairobi’s fragmented character while also recognizing its contingent coherency. Nairobi Becoming curates an eclectic collection of different voices and interventions to evoke something of the city's manifold guises and historicities – an urban mosaic of partial experiences as well as dawning possibilities for future becomings. Assembling scholarship, literature, creative non-fiction, and visual art, the contributions are arranged around particular themes, while resisting the urge to develop a singular coherent voice. Security – in its various guises – is the linking thread, the point of articulation that connects apparently disparate elements of Nairobi life, from sex work to roadbuilding, goat markets to funerals. Security is here an analytical operator: a concept that refracts the seemingly diverse modalities of life in Nairobi, and, with the related domains of uncertainty and contingency, brings the city’s dynamics of fragmentation and coherence to the surface in surprising ways. If confronting Nairobi’s will to coherence amidst the strains of fragmentation is the empirical and analytical challenge of Nairobi Becoming, then it is through collaboration and juxtaposition, curation and contrast, and the messiness of assemblage, that this book chimes with the fraught multiplicities of a city-in-the-making. As such, this book is also an exploration of the inevitable tension that exists between curatorial intent and the possibility of allowing each contribution to stand for itself.