I'm in the States right now and, partly coincidentally, Americans are featuring heavily in my current reading matter. Before I came, it was the someway neglected 1930s novelist John Fante (an influence on the poet and boozer Charles Bukowski), and his Arturo Bandini quartet of novels, particularly, Ask The Dust. There's a swing and a sweetness to the prose of Fante's fictional alter ego, and a vulnerability and alertness to this wannabe-writer immigrants' son as he lands in Los Angeles. There are memorable stream-of-consciousness passages as there are also in Trinidadian-British immigrant's Sam Selvon's novels, The Lonely Londoners and its sequel, The Housing Lark, which I am, to my shame, finally reading in full. Selvon never got the props* handed to his compatriot and fellow arrival V. S. Naipaul, but there's a humanity and inventiveness in his work below a seemingly 'naive' exterior. Perhaps this year, the 50th anniversary of his pioneering debut, will see new light shine on him.

I say, 'in full', but one of the more pleasant aspects of Selvon's novels is their brevity. I'm all about short right now. I do think a lot of novels could be shorter. Many suffer from a bagginess, or lack urgency or freshness in their way of telling; seem too hidebound for a cine- and pop music-literate age. I'm using a bunch of 'short-writing' techniques in my novel-in-progress and, with that on the boil, have been reading a number of vignette-minded writers: some of the short stories of American William Morris, Cuban Guile Infante Cabrera's View of Dawn in the Tropics, a novel by Ray Loriga called My Brother's Gun, and poet Gwendolyn Brooks' sole fictional foray, the very fine Maud and Martha. All are skilled at deploying fragments to tell you what you need to know about a character and his situation without supplying the full, orthodox-rendered background. There's often a poet's conciseness, a poet's feel for texture, to their prose and, not surprisingly, poets have been among my reading too. I'm enjoying a collection by the Jamaican/American poet and academic Mark McMorris, The Blaze of the Poui, his third. Mark belongs to a new generation - nothing as tight as 'school' - of black experimentalists who are writing work that is only very loosely narrative-bound, and he shares with many of the writers I mention above a certain distinctive stance towards the topic, the matter at hand. The Blaze of the Poui is to a large degree about conquest/exploration and Eros, and the interchangeability of those two discourses and numbers For the Love of Women amongst its standouts. Plenty of felicitous verbal mishandlings, a la Kamau Braithwaite, here.

That's about it, in terms of creative writing. I've also been hitting a fair amount of anthropology-related non-fiction, on the back of an essay I'm putting together about the British Museum and its Africa collections, but that's another post-colonial story ...

Novelist Diran Adebayo is the British Council USA's 2006 UK Writer-in-Residence at Georgetown University, Washington DC.

* 'props ' = 'acclaim'