Instead of dream vacations to Disney World and hotels with swimming pools and water slides, the parents in Travels with My Family insist on obscure destinations in the middle of nowhere. They're determined to go, even if it means hours of dull driving filled with countless back-seat, argument-inducing games of Twenty Questions and out-loud readings of the How to Change a Tire chapter from the owner s manual. But bad as the travel is, it's nothing compared to what happens when they arrive: eating grasshoppers in Mexico, forgetting the tide schedule while collecting sand dollars off the...

Brilliant and tense, Dany Laferriere's first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, is as fresh and relevant today as when it was first published in Canada in 1985. With ribald humor and a working-class intellectualism on par with Charles Bukowski's or Henry Miller's, Laferriere's narrator wanders the streets and slums of Montreal, has sex with white women, and writes a book to save his life. With this novel, Laferriere began a series of internationally acclaimed social and political novels about the love of the world, and the world of sex, including Heading...