The Shallow Tales Review, a Nigeria-based online literary magazine, has released its Issue 31. Themed “FREEDOM,” the issue is guest-edited by the Motswana writer Temani Nkalolang. It features fiction, poetry, essays, art photography, and a one-act play. There are 27 contributors, from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Kenya.
The magazine was founded in August 2019 by its fiction editor Nzube Nlebedim. It “aims to share the unique African story.” It wants to “tell of the African who rises from his shallow depths to prominence,” and “chronicle the shift from mediocrity to success.”
“There is a freedom redolent in African art today,” Nlebedim writes in the editorial for Issue 31, “and anyone perceptive to literary trends over the past six decades, starting some years before Things Fall Apart to its publication and going further, would understand that there has been a great difference in the acceptance of literary writers to many truths.”
Nlebedim acknowledges this freedom—that “entails something of a movement and progression from one thing to another, from one plane to another”—as a good thing and calls on writers, musicians, curators, and publishers to embrace it.
The Shallow Tales Review’s previous issue, themed “GRIEF,” was released in November 2020. The Shallow Tales Review’s editorial team includes poetry editor Chidiebube Onye Okohia, nonfiction editor Adesuwa Igbinawan, and art and photography editors Anjorin Feranmi & Ene Ochayi.
