H
Onitsha Market Literature
Life Turns Man Up and Down
About this Work
Kurt Thometz’s anthology Life Turns Man Up and Down: High Life, Useful Advice, and Mad English is the definitive English-language anthology of Onitsha Market Literature. Published by Pantheon Books in New York in 2001, it brought together selections from the most vivid and remarkable pamphlets of the genre — romance stories, cautionary advice, political commentary, and moral instruction — accompanied by Thometz’s authoritative introduction to the tradition.
The anthology is grouped in the collection alongside the original pamphlets as a scholarly companion — the critical and curatorial frame through which the genre has been most widely introduced to international readers. Thometz spent years collecting and researching these pamphlets, and his selection and introduction remain the best single point of entry into Onitsha Market Literature for the general reader.
The anthology is grouped in the collection alongside the original pamphlets as a scholarly companion — the critical and curatorial frame through which the genre has been most widely introduced to international readers. Thometz spent years collecting and researching these pamphlets, and his selection and introduction remain the best single point of entry into Onitsha Market Literature for the general reader.
