Download or read book Black Bazaar written by Alain Mabanckou and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2012-07-05 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 Buttologist is down on his uppers. His girlfriend, Original Colour, has cleared out of their Paris studio and run off to the Congo with a vertically challenged drummer known as The Mongrel. She's taken their daughter with her. Meanwhile, a racist neighbour spies on him something wicked, accusing him of 'digging a hole in the Dole'. And his drinking buddies at Jips, the Afro-Cuban bar in Les Halles, pour scorn on Black Bazaar, the journal he keeps to log his sorrows. There are days when only the Arab in the corner shop has a kind word; while at night his dreams are stalked by the cannibal pygmies of Gabon. Then again, Buttologist wears no ordinary uppers. He has style, bags of it (suitcases of crocodile and anaconda Westons, to be precise). He's a dandy from the Bacongo district of Brazzaville - AKA a sapeur or member of the Society of Ambience-makers and People of Elegance. But is flaunting sartorial chic against tough times enough for Buttologist to cut it in the City of Light?

Download or read book On the Postcolony written by Achille Mbembe and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-06-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Refreshing a stale debate about power in the postcolonial state, this book addresses a topic debated across the humanities and social sciences: how to define, discuss, and address power and the subjective experience of ordinary people in the face of power?

Download or read book Allah is Not Obliged written by Ahmadou Kourouma and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ALLAH IS NOT OBLIGED TO BE FAIR ABOUT ALL THE THINGS HE DOES HERE ON EARTH.These are the words of the boy soldier Birahima in the final masterpiece by one of Africa’s most celebrated writers, Ahmadou Kourouma. When ten-year-old Birahima's mother dies, he leaves his native village in the Ivory Coast, accompanied by the sorcerer and cook Yacouba, to search for his aunt Mahan. Crossing the border into Liberia, they are seized by rebels and forced into military service. Birahima is given a Kalashnikov, minimal rations of food, a small supply of dope and a tiny wage. Fighting in a chaotic civil war alongside many other boys, Birahima sees death, torture, dismemberment and madness but somehow manages to retain his own sanity. Raw and unforgettable, despairing yet filled with laughter, Allah Is Not Obliged reveals the ways in which children's innocence and youth are compromised by war.

Download or read book Life and a Half written by Sony Labou Tansi and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This crisp translation by Alison Dundy maintains the fast-paced action and bitingly satiric tone of the original.

Download or read book Murambi The Book of Bones written by Boubacar Boris Diop and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[W]hat is true of Rwanda is true in each of us; we all share in Africa." -- L'Harmattan "[This novel] comes closer than have many political scientists or historians to trying to understand why this small country... sank in such appalling violence." -- Radio France International In April of 1994, nearly a million Rwandans were killed in what would prove to be one of the swiftest, most terrifying killing sprees of the 20th century. In Murambi, The Book of Bones, Boubacar Boris Diop comes face to face with the chilling horror and overwhelming sadness of the tragedy. Now, the power of Diop's acclaimed novel is available to English-speaking readers through Fiona Mc Laughlin's crisp translation. The novel recounts the story of a Rwandan history teacher, Cornelius Uvimana, who was living and working in Djibouti at the time of the massacre. He returns to Rwanda to try to comprehend the death of his family and to write a play about the events that took place there. As the novel unfolds, Cornelius begins to understand that it is only our humanity that will save us, and that as a writer, he must bear witness to the atrocities of the genocide. From the novel: "If only by the way people are walking, you can see that tension is mounting by the minute. I can feel it almost physically. Everyone is running or at least hurrying about. I meet more and more passersby who seem to be walking around in circles. There seems to be another light in their eyes. I think of the fathers who have to face the anguished eyes of their children and who can't tell them anything. For them, the country has become an immense trap in the space of just a few hours. Death is on the prowl. They can't even dream of defending themselves. Everything has been meticulously prepared for a long time: the administration, the army, and the [militia] are going to combine forces to kill, if possible, every last one of them."

Download or read book The Bush Toads written by Tierno Monénembo and published by Drumbeat. This book was released on 1983 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book I Am a Japanese Writer written by Dany Laferrière and published by Douglas & McIntyre. This book was released on 2011 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A devilishly intelligent new novel by the internationally bestselling author and Prix Mï??dicis winner. A black writer from Montreal has found the perfect title for his next book: I Am a Japanese Writer. His publisher gives him an advance on the strength of the title alone. The problem is, he can't seem to write a word of it. He can scarcely summon the energy to put pen to paper, and so he nurses his writer's block by taking long baths, re-reading the works of Japanese poet Basho and engaging in amorous intrigues with rising pop star Midori and her entourage of vampire girls. For the writer, though, the title isn't just a title: he really does believe he is a Japanese writer. He makes this declaration in a mall, and, the next thing he knows, he's an international celebrity. The book becomes a cult phenomenon, even though he still hasn't written a word of it. In Japan, it sets off a cultural revolution. A Japanese writer even publishes a book called I Am a Malagasy Writer. On the nightly news, a Japanese officer declares, "I Am a Korean Soldier." No wonder a pair of attachï??s from the Japanese embassy has been following our hero around. At first, he is delighted to discover his celebrity. But things quickly go wrong. Part postmodern fantasy, part Kafkaesque nightmare and part travelogue to the inner reaches of the self, I Am a Japanese Writer calls into question everything we think we know about what-and who-makes a work of art.

Download or read book Broken Glass written by Alain Mabanckou and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An irreverent, allusive, scatalogical, tragicomic masterpiece that centers on the patrons of a run-down bar as they try to document the details of their lives in a country that appears to have forgotten the importance of remembering. In Republic of the Congo, in the town of Trois-Cents, in a bar called Credit Gone West, a former schoolteacher known as Broken Glass drinks red wine and records the stories of the bar and its regulars for posterity: Stubborn Snail, the owner, who must battle church people, ex-alcoholics, tribal leaders, and thugs set on destroying him and his business; the Printer, who had his respectable life in France ruined by a white woman, his wife; Robinette, who could outdrink and outpiss any man; and Broken Glass himself, whose own tale involves as much heartbreak, squalor, disappointment, and delusion. But Broken Glass fails spectacularly at staying out of trouble as one denizen after another wants to rewrite history in an attempt at making sure his portrayal will properly reflect their exciting and dynamic lives. Despondent over this apparent triumph of self-delusion over self-awareness, Broken Glass drowns his sorrows and riffs on the great books of Africa and the West. Brimming with life, death, and literary allusions, Broken Glass is Mabanckou's finest novel--a mocking satire of the dangers of artistic integrity.

Download or read book The Shameful State written by Sony Labou Tansi and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-03 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in a fictitious African nation, this novel by the distinguished writer Sony Labou Tansi takes aim at the corruption, degeneracy, violence, and repression of political life in Africa. At the heart of The Shameful State is the story of Colonel Martillimi Lopez, the nation's president, whose eccentricity and whims epitomize the "shameful situation in which humanity has elected to live." Lopez stages a series of grotesque and barbaric events while his nation falls apart. Unable to resist the dictator's will, his desperate citizens are left with nothing but humiliation. The evocation of this deranged world is a showcase for the linguistic and stylistic inventiveness that are the hallmark of Sony Labou Tansi's work. This first English translation by Dominic Thomas includes a foreword by Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou that contextualizes the novel's importance in literary history and the significance of Sony Labou Tansi for future generations of writers.

Download or read book Giambatista Viko or The Rape of African Discourse written by Georges Ngal and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2022-03-23 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Georges Ngal's pathbreaking satire Giambatista Viko explores the vexed relations between metropolitan centers and peripheral former colonies through its titular antihero, an African professor at an African studies institute divided between European-focused cosmopolitans and Africanists. Struggling to write the great African novel and subject to abuse, Viko realizes he can no longer separate the African and the European parts of his multilayered, African francophone culture. Viko's fate is a warning about the perils of artistic creation in a world where power is not shared. Part of the wave of African novels of the 1960s and 1970s that grappled with the disenchantments of decolonization, Giambatista Viko can be read at once as a Congolese novel, a francophone novel, and a work of world literature.

Download or read book Loukoum written by Calixthe Beyala and published by Heinemann Educational Books. This book was released on 1995 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Belleville is the African immigrant quarter of Paris, where seven year-old Loukoum lives with his family. While his father spends time having affairs and drinking in the cafe with fellow Africans, his father's two wives look after the children at home.

Download or read book Hybrid Humour written by R. Graeme Dunphy and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2010 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graeme Dunphy is lecturer in English at Regensburg University, Germany. His interests include Scotland, Germany, the Netherlands, Literature, Medieval Studies, Historical Linguistics, and Migration Studies. He has published widely on Medieval and Baroque Literature as well as on migrant literature. Rainer Emig is professor of English Literature and Culture at Leibniz University Hanover, Germany. His main interests are English Literature and Culture of the 19th and 20th century, contemporary culture, and Literary and Cultural Theories, including postcolonial approaches and Gender Studies.

Download or read book Afrique Sur Seine written by Odile Cazenave and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2006-09 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses the development since the 1950s of a new type of Francophone African novel created by first-generation African authors living in France. This book examines how these authors, men and women, part from mainstream African literature by exploring more personal avenues while retaining a shared interest in the community of African emigrants.

Download or read book Aspects Linguistiques de la Petite Annonce written by Banks David Banks and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: