Download or read book The Negro Grandsons of Vercingetorix written by Alain Mabanckou and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author of Black Moses is at his satiric best in this novel the catalogs the pain and suffering caused by the ravages of civil war. Set in the imaginary African Republic of Vietongo, The Negro Grandsons of Vercingetorix begins when conflict breaks out between rival leaders and the regional ethnic groups they represent. Events recorded in a series of notebooks under the watchful eye of Hortense Lloki show how civil war culminates in a series of outlandish actions perpetrated by the warring parties’ private militias—the Anacondas and the Romans from the North who have seized power against Vercingetorix (named after none other than the legendary Gallic warrior who fought against Caesar’s army) and his Little Negro Grandsons in the South who are eager to regain control. Translated into English for the first time, this novel provides a gritty slice of life in an active war zone. “Nearly twenty years removed from its French publication, Mabanckou’s aptitude for characterization and his unflinching glimpse of plight echo within every movement of Vercingetorix . . . With The Negro Grandsons of Vercingetorix, Mabanckou stresses that even as violence is an accomplice to life, perseverance is synonymous.” —World Literature Today

Download or read book The Negro Grandsons of Vercingetorix written by Alain Mabanckou and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the imaginary African Republic of Vietongo, The Negro Grandsons of Vercingetorix begins when conflict breaks out between rival leaders and the regional ethnic groups they represent. Events recorded in a series of notebooks under the watchful eye of Hortense Lloki show how civil war culminates in a series of outlandish actions perpetrated by the warring parties' private militias—the Anacondas and the Romans from the North who have seized power against Vercingetorix (named after none other than the legendary Gallic warrior who fought against Caesar's army) and his Little Negro Grandsons in the South who are eager to regain control. Award-winning author Alain Mabanckou is at his satiric best in this novel that catalogues the pain and suffering caused by the ravages of civil war. Translated into English for the first time, this novel provides a gritty slice of life in an active war zone.

Download or read book Mediating Violence from Africa written by George MacLeod and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2023-10 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mediating Violence from Africa explores how African and non-African Francophone authors, filmmakers, editors, and scholars have packaged, interpreted, and filmed the violent histories of post-Cold War Francophone Africa. This violence, much of which unfolded in front of Western television cameras, included the use of child soldiers facilitated by the Soviet Union's castoff Kalashnikov rifles, the rise of Islamist terrorism in West Africa, and the horrific genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Through close readings of fictionalized child-soldier narratives, cinematic representations of Islamist militants, genocide survivor testimony, and Western scholarship, George S. MacLeod analyzes the ways Francophone African authors and filmmakers, as well as their editors and scholarly critics, negotiate the aesthetic, political, cultural, and ethical implications of making these traumatic stories visible. MacLeod argues for the need to periodize these productions within a "post-Cold War" framework to emphasize how shifts in post-1989 political discourse are echoed, contested, or subverted by contemporary Francophone authors, filmmakers, and Western scholars. The questions raised in Mediating Violence from Africa are of vital importance today. How the world engages with and responds to stories of recent violence and loss from Africa has profound implications for the affected communities and individuals. More broadly, in an era in which stories and images of violence, from terror attacks to school shootings to police brutality, are disseminated almost instantly and with minimal context, these theoretical questions have implications for debates surrounding the ethics of representing trauma, the politicization of memory, and Africa's place in a global (as opposed to a postcolonial or Euro-African) economic and political landscape.

Download or read book Congo Inc written by In Koli Jean Bofane and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-08 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the sound of machine gun fire and the smell of burning flesh, award-winning author In Koli Jean Bofane leads readers on a perilous, satirical journey through the civil conflict and political instability that have been the logical outcome of generations of rapacious multinational corporate activity, corrupt governance, widespread civil conflict, human rights abuses, and environmental degradation in Africa. Isookanga, a Congolese Pygmy, grows up in a small village with big dreams of becoming rich. His vision of the world is shaped by his exploits in Raging Trade, an online game where he seizes control of the world's natural resources by any means possible: high-tech weaponry, slavery, and even genocide. Isookanga leaves his sleepy village to make his fortune in the pulsating capital Kinshasa, where he joins forces with street children, warlords, and a Chinese victim of globalization in this blistering novel about capitalism, colonialism, and the world haunted by the ghosts of Bismarck and Leopold II. Told with just enough levity to make it truly heartbreaking, Congo Inc. is a searing tale about ecological, political, and economic failure.

Download or read book Blue White Red written by Alain Mabanckou and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-21 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Mabanckou dazzles with technical dexterity and emotional depth” in his debut novel, winner of the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noire (Publishers Weekly, starred review). This tale of wild adventure reveals the dashed hopes of Africans living between worlds. When Moki returns to his village from France wearing designer clothes and affecting all the manners of a Frenchman, Massala-Massala, who lives the life of a humble peanut farmer after giving up his studies, begins to dream of following in Moki’s footsteps. Together, the two take wing for Paris, where Massala-Massala finds himself a part of an underworld of out-of-work undocumented immigrants. After a botched attempt to sell metro passes purchased with a stolen checkbook, he winds up in jail and is deported. Blue White Red is a novel of postcolonial Africa where young people born into poverty dream of making it big in the cities of their former colonial masters. Alain Mabanckou’s searing commentary on the lives of Africans in France is cut with the parody of African villagers who boast of a son in the country of Digol. Praise for Alain Mabanckou and Blue White Red “Mabanckou counts as one of the most successful voices of young African literature.” —Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin “The African Beckett.” —The Economist “Blue White Red stands at the beginning of the author’s remarkable and multifaceted career as a novelist, essayist and poet . . . this debut novel shows much of his style and substance in remarkable ways . . . Dundy’s translation is excellent.” —Africa Book Club “Mabanckou’s provocative novel probes the many facets of the ‘migration adventure.’” —Booklist

Download or read book Concrete Flowers written by Wilfried N'Sondé and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-08 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behind the bars on her window, Rosa Maria dreams of sunshine, love, calm, and leaving the city where she lives with her family. She suffers her father's beatings, hides her femininity behind shapeless clothing, and pines for the beautiful Jason as she awaits her opportunity to flee. Meanwhile, her older brother is found dead in a nearby parking lot, and the neighborhood explodes in a riot against the police. Rosa Maria resolves to act before she is devoured by family intrigues and despair. Wilfried N'Sondé's powerful voice creates a palpable sense of the absence of hope and the social and racial isolation that pervade the Paris projects, even as he never abandons the expansive capacity of individuals to dream of better lives beyond a seemingly hopeless reality.

Download or read book Letter to Jimmy written by Alain Mabanckou and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written on the twentieth anniversary of James Baldwin’s death, Letter to Jimmy is African writer Alain Mabanckou’s ode to his literary hero and an effort to place Baldwin’s life in context within the greater African diaspora. Beginning with a chance encounter with a beggar wandering along a Santa Monica beach—a man whose ragged clothes and unsteady gait remind the author of a character out of one of James Baldwin’s novels— Mabanckou uses his own experiences as an African living in the US as a launching pad to take readers on a fascinating tour of James Baldwin’s life. As Mabanckou reads Baldwin’s work, looks at pictures of him through the years, and explores Baldwin’s checkered publishing history, he is always probing for answers about what it must have been like for the young Baldwin to live abroad as an African-American, to write obliquely about his own homosexuality, and to seek out mentors like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison only to publicly reject them later. As Mabanckou travels to Paris, reads about French history and engages with contemporary readers, his letters to Baldwin grow more intimate and personal. He speaks to Baldwin as a peer—a writer who paved the way for his own work, and Mabanckou seems to believe, someone who might understand his experiences as an African expatriate.

Download or read book In Praise of Fragments written by Meena Alexander and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Praise of Fragments is a collection of various and inter-related works, including a sequence of poems written about Venetian Jewish poet Sarra Copia Sulam (1592-1641), lyric essays about Venice, a suite of poems about Hyderabad, where Alexander lived for many years, and a series of brief sketches of memoir about her childhood in Kerala, the subject of her groundbreaking memoir Fault Lines. The writings are accompanied by a series of sumi ink drawings by Alexander and an afterword by Leah Suffrant.

Download or read book Queen of Flowers and Pearls written by Gabriella Ghermandi and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mahlet, a young Ethiopian girl with a gift for storytelling, has a special bond with Yacob, the oldest in her household. When Yacob tells her stories of how he and the other warriors fought in the resistance against the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, Mahlet vows to become the keeper and teller of her family's stories. From the time of Menelik to the present, Mahlet's long voyage through time and space links thousands of stories between Africa and Europe. Intensely personal, this powerful and beautifully narrated novel tells the story of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia as well as of others around the globe who have suffered under colonialism or have been forcibly exiled from their homelands.

Download or read book A Book of Golden Deeds written by Charlotte Mary Yonge and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 1927 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Lights of Pointe Noire written by Alain Mabanckou and published by Serpent's Tail. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, at the age of twenty-two, not to return until a quarter of a century later. When at last he comes home to Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on Congo's south-eastern coast, he finds a country that in some ways has changed beyond recognition: the cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on glamorous American culture has become a Pentecostal temple, and his secondary school has been re-named in honour of a previously despised colonial ruler. But many things remain unchanged, not least the swirling mythology of Congolese culture which still informs everyday life in Pointe-Noire. Mabanckou though, now a decorated French-Congolese writer and esteemed professor at UCLA, finds he can only look on as an outsider at the place where he grew up. As he delves into his childhood, into the life of his departed mother and into the strange mix of belonging and absence that informs his return to Congo, Mabanckou slowly builds a stirring exploration of the way home never leaves us, however long ago we left home.

Download or read book In the Year of the Rabbit written by Terrance A. Harkin and published by Silkworm Books. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Elena Ferrante s Key Words written by Tiziana de Rogatis and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Tackles novelist Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet in terms of their ‘creative forms of [female] resistance’ . . . A richly layered study.” —Kirkus Reviews “I greatly admire the work of Tiziana de Rogatis. She is a reader of deep refinement. Often I think that she knows my books better than I. So, I read her with admiration and remain silent.” —Elena Ferrante, in the magazine, San Lian Sheng Huo Zhou Kan Ferrante’s four-volume novel cycle known in English as the Neapolitan quartet has become a global success, with over ten million readers in close to fifty countries. Her readers recount feeling “addicted” to the novels; they describe a pleasure in reading that is as rare as it is irresistible, a compulsion that leads them either to devour the books or to ration them so as to prolong the pleasure. De Rogatis here addresses that same transnational, diverse, transversal audience. Elena Ferrante’s Key Words is conceived as a lighted path made of luminous key words that synthesize the multiform aspects of Ferrante’s writing and guide us through the labyrinth of her global success. “An exceptional companion to the source material, particularly for the lit-crit crowd looking to affirm Ferrante’s reinvention of the future of the novel.” —Library Journal

Download or read book The Tears of the Black Man written by Alain Mabanckou and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Tears of the Black Man, award-winning author Alain Mabanckou explores what it means to be black in the world today. Mabanckou confronts the long and entangled history of Africa, France, and the United States as it has been shaped by slavery, colonialism, and their legacy today. Without ignoring the injustices and prejudice still facing blacks, he distances himself from resentment and victimhood, arguing that focusing too intensely on the crimes of the past is limiting. Instead, it is time to ask: Now what? Embracing the challenges faced by ethnic minority communities today, The Tears of the Black Man looks to the future, choosing to believe that the history of Africa has yet to be written and seeking a path toward affirmation and reconciliation.

Download or read book Black Moses written by Alain Mabanckou and published by Serpent's Tail. This book was released on 2017-03-23 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF PRIZE It's 1970, and in the People's Republic of Congo a Marxist-Leninist revolution is ushering in a new age. But at the orphanage on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire where young Moses has grown up, the revolution has only strengthened the reign of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, the orphanage's corrupt director. So Moses escapes to Pointe-Noire, where he finds a home first with a larcenous band of Congolese Merry Men and then among the Zairian prostitutes of the Trois-Cents quarter. But the authorities won't leave Moses in peace, and intervene to chase both the Merry Men and the Trois-Cents girls out of town. All this injustice pushes poor Moses over the edge. Could he really be the Robin Hood of the Congo? Or is he just losing his marbles? Vivid, exuberant and heartwarming, Black Moses is a vital new extension of Alain Mabanckou's extraordinary, interlinked body of work dedicated to his native Congo, and confirms his status as one of our great storytellers.

Download or read book The Man in the Arena written by Theodore Roosevelt and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first compilation of selections from the major works of Teddy Roosevelt since the resurgence in his popularity due to the major award-winning/bestselling biographies by Edmond Morris and H. W. Brands By the time he was twenty-five the future president of the United States was already a published author. From The Naval War of 1812 through his four-volume Winning of the West, Teddy Roosevelt proved himself a master historian...but one must not make the mistake of labeling him a stodgy academic. The future president was also a great outdoorsman, with such works as Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail and African Game Trails capturing his rough and ready lifestyle. Theodore Roosevelt was part Francis Parkman, part Lowell Thomas, and one hundred percent spirit of America and master of the printed page. The Man in the Arena collects self-contained excerpts from some of his greatest works, including such revealing memoirs as The Rough Riders, the Autobiography, and Through the Brazilian Wilderness, in an effort to capture the many aspects of a great American who was indeed larger than life and his own best "Boswell." "This collection of his writings gives credence to Henry Adams's assertion that Roosevelt was "pure Act": there was, it seems, no subject (or foe) he was afraid to tackle. " - Publishers Weekly

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.