"Paul Tiyambe Zeleza opens his new story collection with a flourish. Exile is defined in both the broadest terms -banishment from the spirit world- and in the specific terms of the African diaspora."
The Montreal Gazette, September 3, 1994.
"The Joys of Exile is a powerful collection of stories by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. [the] author in the tradition of the African story teller allows themes to unravel which provokes the reader to look in the mirror..."
Akili The journal of African-Canadian Studies, 1994.
"The protean intellectual consciousness of Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has shaped for us here provocative mirrors of the human condition in Africa. His probes in these stories often range from the physical to the metaphysical. No matter where the story is set, inside or outside Africa, here in the world or beyond this world, in the territory of dreams or prebirth, the African-centered concern of the writer remains unquestionable. The strength of Zeleza's art rests in the manner in which the most hilarious situations suddenly become somber and grave and, at times, vice versa."
World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Winter), 1996.
"This is an honest and significant narrative, neither hopelessly caught up in past historical injustices nor forgetful of the many forms of injustice and exile that continue and are likely to continue in the present world."
Canadian Literature, No. 150, Autumn, 1996.
