"This charming, vivid and poetic book captures the poignancy of immigrant life and all the unresolved pain of Africa's relationship with its former colonial powers."--Michela Wrong

Salie lives in Paris. Back home on the Senegalese island of Niodior, her football-crazy brother Madicke counts on her to get him to France, the promised land where foreign footballers become world famous. The story of Salie and Madicke highlights the painful situation of those who emigrate. It is a moving account of one of the great tragedies of our time.

Dominique Edde met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. "His presence," she writes, "gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated and precise. . . . Genet's movements mimicked the movement of time, accumulating rather than passing."
This book is Edde's account of that meeting and its ripples through her years of engaging with Genet's life and work. Rooted in personal reminiscences, it is nonetheless much broader, offering a subtle analysis of Genet's work and teasing out largely unconsidered themes, like the...

Mireille Gansel grew up in the traumatic aftermath of her family losing everything--including their native languages--to Nazi Germany. In the 1960s and 70s, she translated poets from East Berlin and Vietnam to help broadcast their defiance to the rest of the world. Winner of a French Voices Award, Gansel's debut illustrates the estrangement every translator experiences for the privilege of moving between tongues and muses on how translation becomes an exercise of empathy between those in exile.