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Their father's favourite saying, between drinks and blows, was, "Life holds only bad surprises, and the last one will be death." And now, Colin observes of the man sprawled under all the broken furniture, their father was definitely and forever out of surprises. This is the story Colin tells of what happened - and what happened before that.

What is Africa's own 'heart of darkness'? It is what confronts Ayane when, after three years abroad, she returns to the Central African village of her birth. Now an 'outsider' with foreign ways distrusted by her fellow villagers, she must face alone the customs and superstitions that bind this clan of men and women.

Annie Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where "things seen" reflect a private life meeting the larger world. Ernaux's thought-provoking observations map the world's fleeting and lasting impressions on the shape of inner life.

"It is to me that we owe our immortality, and this is the story that proves it beyond all doubt." With this sentence Rene Belletto begins a novel that compresses every genre he has worked in - thriller, science fiction, experimental literature, horror - into one breathless narrative in which what is at stake is nothing less than our own immortality.

Such was the battle that raged between Cousin K and me: good done badly; evil done well."" And such is the twisted logic of good and bad, right and wrong, knitted into this novella by one of the most powerful voices to emerge from North Africa in our time.

Maurice Blanchot is a towering yet enigmatic figure in twentieth-century French thought. Both his fiction and his criticism played a determining role in how postwar French philosophy was written, especially in its intense concern with the question of writing as such. This volume collects his political writings from 1953 to 1993.

Port-au-Prince, the 1960s: Duvalier and his militia are systematically eliminating opponents to the regime. Daniel Leroy, editor in chief of the opposition newspaper, has just been arrested. To find out what has become of him, his wife, Nirvah, visits Raoul Vincent, secretary of state at the Office of Public Safety. This fearsome head of the secret police is instantly smitten, and to ensure her husband''s survival and protect her family, Nirvah submits to the official''s desires. Becoming the mistress of a strongman in the regime is not without its benefits. Still, she has to endure her neighbors'' inquisitive looks and the silent questions of her own children.Kettly Mars''s Savage Seasons describes a pivotal and painful period in Haitian history by weaving together two stories: the personal story of Nirvah and her family and the universal story of Duvalier''s dictatorial regime and its abuses.Kettly Mars was born in 1958 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where she resides today. She is the author of three novels and two story collections. Jeanine Herman is a translator for Artforum magazine and has translated the works of numerous authors, most recently Julia Kristeva''s Hatred and Forgiveness and Eric Laurrent''s Do Not Touch. Herman is a chevalier in the French Order of Arts and Letters. Madison Smartt Bell is a professor of English at Goucher College and is known for his trilogy of novels about the Haitian Revolution.

"Where is your wound?" asks Jean Genet in the lines Laurent Mauvignier uses as an epigraph to The Wound. By the time we have finished this four-part novel, we realise that for many the wound lies four decades back in "the Events" that people have tried not to talk about ever since: the Algerian War.

In sixteen ferocious short stories, French author Luc Lang encapsulates the brutality of everyday life. Each tale is an admixture of tragedy, comedy, ridicule, and pain. Compassion lurks somewhere, perhaps, but pity is conspicuous by its absence. Lang's curt, agitated prose disassembles daily life with a swift, unflinching hand and examines it with a sharp, analytic eye.

In a literary reversal as deadly serious as it is wickedly satiric, this novel by the acclaimed French-speaking African writer Abdourahman A. Waberi turns the fortunes of the world upside down. On this reimagined globe a stream of sorry humanity flows from the West, from the slums of America and the squalor of Europe, to escape poverty and desperation in the prosperous United States of Africa.