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Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau has long been a proponent of "Creolity," a literary movement that seeks to preserve the character of Creole language and culture against the threat of assimilation into French ways of speaking and thinking. In School Days, the author transports us back to his childhood, providing a context for the artistic and personal choices he has made as an adult.

The lines are clearly drawn early on in this memoir; young Chamoiseau's teacher, a black Martinican who has adopted both the language and the attitudes of France, is contrasted with the rich cultural and linguistic traditions that thrive outside the school. At school, Teacher lectures on Alexander, Napoleon, the superiority of Western civilization; European fairy-tales about Cinderella and Merlin dominate the classroom while out on the playground, Creole children whisper illicit stories of zombies, water sprites, and flying sorceresses. Light-skinned children become favorites; dark-skinned ones are subjected to Teacher's ridicule; Creole equals shame. The students' sense of confusion is heightened even further when Teacher becomes ill and a substitute takes over the class for a week. This teacher, imbued with the ideals of "Negritude," replaces white with black, strawberry with calabash, Gaul with African, yet remains as dogmatic in his own way as Teacher.

School Days is a ribald, terrifying, ultimately joyful journey through Patrick Chamoiseau's formative years. At the end, the author's younger self begins to master French at last, but he also finds" bit by bit by bit the homey little Creole in his head was joined by scraps of French words, phrases...There was no looking back...." In these lines, Chamoiseau provides a glimpse of the man this boy will eventually become..
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In June 2002, Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman from the impoverished village of Meerwala, was gang raped by a local clan known as the Mastoi -- punishment for indiscretions allegedly committed by the woman's brother. While certainly not the first account of a female body being negotiated for honor in a family, this time the survivor had bravely chosen to fight back. In doing so, Mai single-handedly changed the feminist movement in Pakistan, one of the world's most adverse climates for women.

By July 2002, the Pakistani government awarded her the equivalent of 8,500 U.S. dollars in compensation money and sentenced her attackers to death -- and Mukhtar Mai went on to open a school for girls so that future generations would not suffer, as she had, from illiteracy.

In this rousing account, Mai describes her experience and how she has since become an agent for change and a beacon of hope for oppressed women around the world. Timely and topical, In the Name of Honor is the remarkable and inspirational memoir of a woman who fought and triumphed against exceptional odds..
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"To make the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda is a painful task that we have no right to shirk—it is part of being a moral adult."—Susan Sontag

In the late 1990s, French author and journalist Jean Hatzfeld made several journeys into the hilly, marshy region of the Bugesera, one of the areas most devastated by the Rwandan genocide of April 1994, where an average of five out of six Tutsis were hacked to death with machete and spear by their Hutu neighbors and militiamen. In the villages of Nyamata and N'tarama, Hatzfeld interviewed fourteen survivors of the genocide, from orphan teenage farmers to the local social worker. For years the survivors had lived in a muteness as enigmatic as the silence of those who survived the Nazi concentration camps. In Life Laid Bare, they speak for those who are no longer alive to speak for themselves; they tell of the deaths of family and friends in the churches and marshes to which they fled, and they attempt to account for the reasons behind the Tutsi extermination. For many of the survivors "life has broken down," while for others, it has "stopped," and still others say that it "absolutely must go on."

These horrific accounts of life at the very edge contrast with Hatzfeld's own sensitive and vivid descriptions of Rwanda's villages and countryside in peacetime. These voices of courage and resilience exemplify the indomitable human spirit, and they remind us of our own moral responsibility to bear witness to these atrocities and to never forget what can come to pass again. Winner of the Prix France Culture and the Prix Pierre Mille, Life Laid Bare allows us, in the author's own words, "to draw as close as we can get to the Rwandan genocide.".
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January 1917: five French soldiers are marched to their own front lines where they will be tossed out into no man's land with their hands tied behind their backs and left for the Germans to shoot. They were, in civilian life, variously a pimp, a mechanic, a farmer, a carpenter, and a fisherman; now they are condemned because each had sought to leave the war by shooting himself in the hand. Taken to a godforsaken trench nicknamed Bingo Crépuscule, the five are reluctantly sent out into the darkness; days later, five bodies are recovered and the families are notified, merely, that the men died in the line of duty.

August 1919: Mathilde Donnay receives a letter from a dying man. In it, the former soldier tells her that he met her beloved fiancé, the fisherman Manech, shortly before he died. Mathilde goes to meet Sergeant Daniel Esperanza at his hospital and there hears the story of the execution. She also receives a package with a photograph of the men and copies of their last letters. As Mathilde reads and rereads the letters and goes over Esperanza's tale, she begins to suspect that perhaps the story didn't end quite so neatly. And so begins her very long investigation into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of five condemned prisoners--one of whom, at least, might not really be dead.

In Mathilde Donnay, Sebastien Japrisot has created one of the most compelling and delightful heroines in modern fiction. Though confined to a wheelchair since childhood, "Mathilde has other lives, varied and quite beautiful ones." She paints, cares for her pets, enjoys a rich fantasy life, and is relentless in her search for the truth about Manech's death. But she is by no means the only vibrant personality leaping off Japrisot's pages. This author has a remarkable ability to draw even minor characters in three dimensions with economy and wit. Take Mathilde's mother, for instance, caught in mid-card game: "At bridge, manille, bezique, Mama is a dirty rotten swine. Not only is she an ace with the pasteboards, but she throws her opponents off their mettle by insulting or making fun of them." And even the characters we meet only through other people's memories--the condemned men--are so fully realized that you find yourself torn over which one you hope may have survived. As Mathilde comes ever closer to solving the mystery of what happened at Bingo Crépuscule that January morning in 1917, Sebastien Japrisot proves himself a master storyteller and A Very Long Engagement a near perfect novel. --Alix Wilber.
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An immediate and critically acclaimed bestseller in France, This Blinding Absence of Light is the latest work by internationally renowned author Tahar Ben Jelloun, the first North African winner of the Prix Goncourt and winner of the Prix Mahgreb. Crafting real life events into narrative fiction, Ben Jelloun reveals the horrific story of the desert concentration camps in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his political enemies in underground cells with no light and only enough food and water to keep them lingering on the edge of death. Working closely with one of the survivors, Ben Jelloun narrates the story in the simplest of language and delivers a shocking novel that explores both the limitlessness of inhumanity and the impossible endurance of the human will..
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By the acclaimed Haitian poet and scholar René Philoctète, the novel Massacre River: "a tour de force by an extraordinary writer" (Edwidge Danticat).

Nestled along a border, Haitians and Dominicans have lived as one people for generations. But in 1937, when Generalissimo Trujillo—"the Lord of demented death"—orders the slaughter of all "Haitian devils," a monstrous raptor appears in the sky over the little Dominican town of Elias Piña, brooding a nightmare. Desperate to save Adèle, the Haitian wife he cherishes, the Dominican Pedro Brito sets out into the dawn—and so begins Massacre River, a tale unlike any other, where machetes can fly, severed heads demand justice, towns are flooded by "the foaming filth of genocides," the wind thinks it's a radio, and a word can literally cut throats. At the heart of this kaleidoscopic drama is the loving and sensual bond between Pedro and Adèle, tenderly evoked in language of astonishing inventiveness by a narrative voice that can turn on a dime, careening through young romance, heartbreak, skin-crawling evil, and Looney Tunes madness to a tumultuous, breathtaking finale worthy of Hieronymus Bosch..
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"The Stones Cry Out is startlingly good as literature. It is also an important addition to a thin historical record. . . . Her account of the revolutionary rhetoric, set against the reality of what the revolutionaries were actually doing, is as macabre as any of the descriptions of bodies."--The Wall Street Journal

"This is a powerful and compelling story of terror, struggle and death sprinkled with moments of tenderness, written by a woman who writes not of politics but only of what she experienced."--New York Times Book Review

In 1975, Molyda Szymusiak (her adoptive name), the daughter of a high Cambodian official, was twelve years old and leading a relatively peaceful life in Phnom Penh. Suddenly, on April 17, Khmer Rouge radicals seized the capital and drove all its inhabitants into the countryside. The chaos that followed has been widely publicized, most notably in the movie The Killing Fields. Murderous brutality coupled with raging famine caused the death of more than two million people, nearly a third of the population. This powerful memoir documents the horror Cambodians experienced in daily life..
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Published for the first time in english, the World War II notebooks of one of the twentieth century's most renowned literary figures.

For decades it has been known that Marguerite Duras had kept four notebooks in a blue closet in her country home in France. But until now no one understood the importance of the material that she had written in the period between 1943 and 1949. Here are the first drafts of her most famous works, the true stories behind The Lover, The War, and several other classics. This book is truly the seventh veil to be lifted by Duras in her multivolume autobiography. Each volume has come closer to the raw truth; here at last are the secrets that have remained hidden for all this time.

In these remarkable writings we discover the difficult, poignant circumstances of Duras's upbringing in colonial Vietnam, where her desperate mother was eager to sell her to the man who became known as "the lover." Here too is her repulsion at her first kiss and her unhappiness at this forced liaison. Once she emigrates to France, we follow her life through the war into the Liberation and the horrific events that she observed in the presence of the resistance members, who interrogated and tortured former collaborators. She also tells of the horrendous effect of finding her husband, returning nearly dead from the Nazi concentration camps. Throughout, Duras paints an unflinching picture of this troubled period.

Everyone who has been interested in Duras's life and work will find this an utterly absorbing volume. These first writings are the closest we will get to the truth of Duras's inner life and thoughts at a critical point in her career..
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