The cloth edition of Assia Djebar's Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, her first work to be published in English, was named by the American Literary Translators Association as an ALTA Outstanding Translation of the Year. Now available in paperback, this collection of three long stories, three short ones, and a theoretical postface by one of North Africa's leading writers depicts the plight of urban Algerian women who have thrown off the shackles of colonialism only to face a postcolonial regime that denies and subjugates them even as it celebrates the liberation of men. Denounced in...
The cloth edition of Assia Djebar's Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, her first work to be published in English, was named by the American Liter...
Of Dreams and Assassins is the urgent and rhythmic fourth novel of Malika Mokeddem, her second to appear in English. Born in Algeria to a Bedouin family that had only recently become sedentary, Mokeddem was raised on the stories of her grandmother, who encouraged her education at a time when girls did not go to school. Though raised in a tolerant version of Islam, Mokeddem nevertheless felt the weight of custom and tradition. Of Dreams and Assassins, though not strictly autobiographical, evokes through the beauty and vastness and oppressive heat of the desert Mokeddem's early yearning for...
Of Dreams and Assassins is the urgent and rhythmic fourth novel of Malika Mokeddem, her second to appear in English. Born in Algeria to a Bedouin f...
Characterized as -the African Voltaire, - Ahmadou Kourouma garnered enormous critical and popular praise upon the 1998 release of his third novel, En attendant le vote des betes sauvages. Kourouma received the Prix des Tropiques, among other prestigious prizes, for that book, and the French edition went on to sell 100,000 copies.
Carrol F. Coates's translation, Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals, introduces English-language audiences to Kourouma's irreverent view of the machinations of the African dictators who played the West against the East during the thirty years of the...
Characterized as -the African Voltaire, - Ahmadou Kourouma garnered enormous critical and popular praise upon the 1998 release of his third novel, ...
One of the first literary works to portray Djiboutians from their own point of view, The Land without Shadows is a collection of seventeen short stories. The author, Abdourahman A. Waberi, one of a handful of francophone writers of fiction to have emerged in the twentieth century from the -confetti-sized state- of Djibouti, has already won international recognition and prizes in African literature for his stories and novel. Because his writing is linked to immigration and exile, his native Djibouti occupies center stage in his work. Drawing on the Somali/Djiboutian oral tradition to...
One of the first literary works to portray Djiboutians from their own point of view, The Land without Shadows is a collection of seventeen s...
-I am a dog, - the narrator of Patrice Nganang's novel plainly informs us. As such, he has learned not to expect too much from life. He can, however, observe the life around him--in his case the impoverished but dynamic Cameroon of the early 1990s, a time known as les annees de braise (the smoldering years). When he isn't limited by the length of his master's leash, the perceptive, even ironic, Mboudjak wanders the streets of Yaounde, a capital city caught in the throes of social and political change. Only partly understanding the words spoken around him (the other dogs are as...
-I am a dog, - the narrator of Patrice Nganang's novel plainly informs us. As such, he has learned not to expect too much from life. He can, howeve...
This novel, published for the first time in English, is one of the most important statements about the Duvalier regime in Haiti, written by a Haitian who played a prominent role in the revolutionary movement that brought down the Lescot regime in January 1946. Depestre's ironic note denying historical origins for the novel does not obscure the scathing caricature of Papa Doc Duvalier and the bloodbath that he visited on his own country, which is called "Zacharyland" after the fictionalized President-for-life Zoocrates Zachary.
This novel, published for the first time in English, is one of the most important statements about the Duvalier regime in Haiti, written by a Haitian ...
