Disturbance-Loving Species

Peter Chilsons fiction debut delivers a fascinating heart-wrenching view of modern African culture filtered through the lens of the West. In a novella and four short stories Chilson who traveled to Africa first as a Peace Corps volunteer and later as a freelance journalist uses a phrase borrowed from biology to point out how our disturbance-loving species thrives in the most chaotic seemingly unlivable situations. As this remarkable collection explores the experiences of Americans struggling to cope with the political and social upheaval of life in Africa and of Africans acclimating to life in the United States Chilson captures in vivid detail the strange exhilarating frisson between cultures.