The Butterfly Jungle Collection
Updated: 7 days ago
FROM THE POLARI PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR AND ARTIST
THE BUTTERFLY JUNGLE is available to order from these outlets:
‘There is nothing more humbling than good writing except when the author is fiercely beautiful and ferociously generous of heart. That Diriye Osman should possess so much talent is only fair in light of his goodness.’
—MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO
'Diriye Osman is an artist of glittering style. His paintings and collages feature luminous color and an eclectic mix of images from ancient Egypt to outer space, and his writing is similarly streetwise and mystical, inspired by jazz, hip-hop, the rhythms of prayer, and the syncopated sounds of multilingual urban slang.'
—SOFIA SAMATAR, The New Inquiry
'Osman's work operates in the naturalistic tradition of Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch (1959) and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947), with their embodiment of altered consciousness, but Osman writes with a lightness and sense of optimism that those earlier works do not exhibit...One senses that it is through writing stories such as Fairytales for Lost Children and The Butterfly Jungle that Osman himself is clearing a space for agency, defiance and leaps of infectious imagination, inviting his readers to step outside their own trained monotony and conformism, and to step more bravely into the jungles in which they are living.'
—JOHN C HAWLEY, 'Diasporic Trans/Forming,' Transafrica
'Osman is a courageous writer but he is also an original one. His language is peppered with Somali words and crafted with all the concision and riches of poetry...at a time when African writing is on the rise, Osman stands above the crowd.'
—The Independent
‘East Africa. South London. Queer. Displaced. Mentally ill. My excitement over Osman and his writing comes, in part, out of delight at the impossibility of categorization.’
—The Telegraph
'Diriye Osman is a master of the surreal. The Butterfly Jungle is a genre-bending encounter with the mind of a queer British-Somali journalist and its mirroring of contemporary life.'
—Brittle Paper
SYNOPSIS
Migil Bile is a confidently curvy, tea-spilling, super-bright, slightly-dizzy queer British-Somali journalist with schizoaffective disorder and sauce to spare. Ensconced deep in the drama of being a twenty-something, working-class South Londoner juggling one too many gig-economy jobs, wonky mental health and romantic wackness, he takes the unsuspecting reader on an existential meditation on immigration, Brexit, gentrification, sexual assault, the pitfalls of being a digital worker, what it's like when all your immediate family members are on the LGBT spectrum, and explores what constitutes community and kinship during a global pandemic.
Shot through with bombast and badassery, fusing Somali, Spanish, Kiswahili, patois, sheng and hip-hop slanguistics into a sex-drenched, fourth wall-smashing blend of poetry, letters, essayistic excursions and interlinked short stories, THE BUTTERFLY JUNGLE is a tour de force and Diriye Osman is a bad bitch/good-natured motherf*cker who never takes mess (but doesn't mind splitting his lunch money with you.)
Ain't sh*t left to say.
Dig in, reader.
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Composed and designed almost entirely on his phone, Diriye Osman's spellbinding follow-up to his landmark debut, FAIRYTALES FOR LOST CHILDREN, is a powerful meditation on Black British queerness, working class bohemia, sexual assault, doxxing, the precariousness of the gig economy and love during the early days of Covid.
This is a masterful, Afrofabulist collection of interlinked stories which invites joy, passion, levity and serious consideration about our present condition.
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Song of the moment: 'Butterfly' by GRETCHEN PARLATO.