Arinze Ifeakandu. Photo credit: Santiago Sanchez.

Arinze Ifeakandu has a new short story in One Story magazine’s issue 256. “The Dreamer’s Litany” explores a volatile relationship between a Hausa man and an Igbo man in a Northern Nigerian city. Ifeakandu, whose first published story, “God’s Children Are Little Broken Things,” won him a 2015 Emerging Writer Fellowship from A Public Space and was shortlisted for the Caine Prize and the Brittle Paper Award for Fiction, is currently an MFA student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where earlier this year he won the Richard Yates Short Story Contest. He has completed a collection of stories.

One Story, a respected identifier of talent, has a tradition of publishing only one story in each of its 12 annual issues, and of titling each issue after its story.

The magazine editor Patrick Ryan writes:

Our new issue, “The Dreamer’s Litany,” reaches for an answer to a very difficult question: What happens when the heart cannot have what it desires?

Auwal is a struggling shopkeeper with a wife, a daughter, and a dream of a better life. When he meets the gregarious Chief, he sees a man who might be able to help them. But Chief wants something in return—something he intuits Auwal might be able to provide no matter how reluctant he is. As their lives begin to overlap more and more, the complexities of their less-than-ideal arrangement grow. Auwal is no stranger to hardship, nor is he a stranger to a broken heart. He wants to do well, do better. But is Chief a path toward betterment, or a fast track in the opposite direction?

One Story is thrilled to be publishing Arinze Afeakandu, a young writer who was one of A Public Space’s Emerging Writer fellows and a finalist for the Caine Prize. “The Dreamer’s Litany” is a tense and fractured love story full of unexpected twists and turns that often take place away from home, after the sun goes down. As the author says in our Q&A, “At night, people will surprise you, surprise even themselves.”

Read an excerpt from “The Dreamer’s Litany” and Ifeakandu’s Q&A with Ryan: HERE.

Buy the issue HERE.