The Butterfly Jungle Collection
- Feb 25
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 28
THE BUTTERFLY JUNGLE is available to order from these outlets:
'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
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 motherfucker who never takes mess (but doesn't mind splitting his lunch money with you.)
Ain't shit left to say.
Dig in, reader.
Song of the moment: 'Butterfly' by GRETCHEN PARLATO.