Both books are excellent-the first won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the second the Orange Prize-as is her 2009 short-story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck. It is her third, after the 2003 coming-of-age story Purple Hibiscus and the 2006 Half of a Yellow Sun, about life during the Biafran War. That outsider acuity is both the subject and the method of Americanah, a new novel by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Generally speaking, only outsiders notice these particulars, which produces something of a paradox: Those who are least at home in a culture often perceive it best. The opposite of exotic, it refers to anything so familiar that we fail to register it-paper towels, say, or the kinds of beds we sleep in, or the fact that, unto others, we have accents. In a 1973 essay called “Approaches to What?,” the French writer Georges Perec coined an excellent word: endotic.
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