Description

The ten short stories in this volume focus on the everyday. The immediate subject is the commonplace, which is described and recounted in realistic detail. And yet, as signaled by the word “evening” in the collection’s title, the usual can also be mistaken for something else in dimming light. Indeed, the starting point of these stories is that the human condition is one of knowing in part. The drama in the stories, such as it is, is in the play of perceptions and beliefs in routine interactions. The short stories show these motions resulting in the sometimes surprising choices, decisions and actions that ordinary men and women make and take as they negotiate their regular lives.

T. Michael Mboya has dabbled in literary and quasi literary work since the late 1980s when he was an undergraduate student. His poems, short stories, and personal essays have appeared in diverse literary magazines and journals, and newspapers, including the Daily Nation, the Sunday Standard, The Weekly Express, Expression Today, Postcolonial Text, ITCH: A Journal of Creative Expression, Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing & Culture, The Thinker: A Pan-African Quarterly for Thought Leaders, and Stichproben: Vienna Journal of African Studies. His “These Things Happen” won First Prize in the Short Story Category at The National Literary Awards in 2004. From 1992 to 1993 Mboya was Features Editor at The Weekly Express, a pioneering regional newspaper that was published in Eldoret, Kenya. Between 1998 and 1999 he was the Literary Editor at Expression Today, a Nairobi-based journal about democracy and human rights. He edited Counterpoint and Other Poems, an anthology of poems published Oxford University Press in 2010. In his regular life T. Michael Mboya is a Professor of African Literatures and Cultures at Moi University, Kenya, where he also had his training (BA, MPhil, DPhil).