A Mage in Summer

Literature & Fiction

Cadiot, Olivier

History & Criticism

Dialogos / Lavender Ink

Poetry. Translated by Julia Leverone. Francisco "Paco" Urondo, journalist and militant, used his poetry to witness and denounce the suppressive Argentine state that unrolled its dirty war in the 1970s. FUEL AND FIRE, a selection produced between 1956 and 1976, the year Urondo was assassinated, is subversive poetry, written with humility and humor and accusation and lament. It places blame on an ignorant public, but hope in the hands of individuals who can give themselves over to love.

Fuel and Fire: Selected Poems 1956–1976

Urondo, Francisco

Poetry

Fiction. Translated by Will Firth. A NOVEL OF LONDON is a classic of European modernism that established Serbian writer Miloš Crnjanski as one of the great eastern European voices of the 20th century. The over-600-page translation will be the first English edition. Published in Belgrade in 1971 as Roman o Londonu, the novel follows an aging Russian émigré, Nikolai Repnin, as he attempts to make a life in the British capital in the 1940s, painting a stark portrait of the war-battered city through the eyes of a person living in a constant state of rejection and alienation. Born a Russian noble in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, Repnin is now reduced to eking out a living from odd jobs in the huge city, whose buildings, monuments, citizens and customs he portrays with fascination. As Repnin wanders the streets and the bureaucracy of the bombed-out city, reminiscing about his opulent past in Russia and subsequent odyssey through Europe's cities after the Revolution, he encounters a host of émigrés from around the world, whose stories also unfold. A pan-European portrait of class structures and the real effects of the war emerges, a vision whose depth and scope may be unmatched in 20th century literature.

A Novel of London

Crnjanski, Milos

United States

Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Inspired by the closing of three Daewoo factories in the Lorraine region of France in 2002, François Bon's novel DAEWOO intertwines journalism, fiction and theater, to explore what actually happens in the lives of working people when they are abruptly stripped of their livelihood and, consequently, their sense of security, purpose, and dignity. In the early 2000s, Bon traveled to the Lorraine intending to do research for a play about the changed lives of the hundreds of suddenly unemployed workers, mostly women, who had assembled microwaves and television sets in the Daewoo factories. But when he arrived he discovered that research was not sufficient, that reportage could not achieve the kind of vigilant witness to events that he sought. To pay homage to truth, he needed fiction; and so DAEWOO was born-a novel combining elements of theater, fictional narrative, journalistic research, and imagined interviews, that together testify to the real damage done to people caught in the multi-national economic squeeze, discarded and forgotten like the buildings they once worked in and maintained.

Daewoo

Bon, François

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Translated by Peter Thompson. Hmoudane--justly famous for popular novels--adds his poetry to the timely warnings of Amin Maalouf, Fouad Laroui and others, providing context to the religious totalitarianism of Morocco today through the epic sectarian battles of its past. Fashioning images of degeneration and hypocrisy, and a tone by turns down to earth and hieratic, he dazzles with a mirror image of the Koran and Islamic history. "I dance like a throat-slit leaping / On the night I call forth and enlist / The stars." This edition is illustrated with full color gravures by Bouchaïb Maoual.

EMERGENCY!

Hmoudane, Mohamed

Fiction. African & African American Studies. Poetry. Drama. Middle Eastern Studies. Translated by Pierre Joris and Jake Syersak. AGADIR is loosely based on the earthquake which devastated the Moroccan city of the same name in 1960, and KhaÃ¯r-Eddine's experience as a civil servant assigned to investigate the aftermath of the cataclysm between 1961 and 1963. An unnamed narrator sent to the city "in order to sort out a particularly precarious situation" tells the story of a veritably razed Moroccan epicenter and a citizenry begging for reconstruction and reimagination. In a surreal, polyphonic narration that explodes into various tesserae of fiction, autobiography, reportage, poetry, and theatre, the narrator quickly discovers that in exhuming the city's physical remnants he cannot help but exhume the complex social, political, cultural, and historical dynamics that make up postcolonial Moroccan society. The mysterious narrator, increasingly besieged by hallucinations of the past and visions of the future, comes to incarnate what Albert Memmi once called "the role of the colonized," and to suffer "a magnified vision of all the ambiguities and impossibilities of those colonized." To which KhaÃ¯r-Eddine appends his envisioned role of the writer: one who uses his magnified vision to transform his very life into "an investigation, a fight against all forms of oppression and repression" until his "literature is a beautiful weapon."

Agadir

Khaïr-Eddine, Mohammed

A Brief History of Music & Fourteen Forms of Melancholy

Arts & Photography

Chirinos, Eduardo

Music

Discovery of the New World

Farès, Nabile

Blue Window (Ventana Azul)

AMIRTHANAYAGAM, INDRAN

The Belly (Le Ventre) is Tchicaya u Tam’si’s ode to Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, fighter for independence and first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lumumba rose on a wave of anti-colonial and nationalist optimism only to be assassinated after two months in office. Tchicaya captures the disappointment and grief of this moment with compelling imagery and a rhythmic drive that renders the threnody unforgettable, both to us as readers and to history. 
Remaining rooted in a constant awareness of the body, Tchicaya’s voice speaks with vigorous conviction of the struggles faced simultaneously on individual, social, and cultural levels. Inheriting from both Surrealism and Negritude, this vital poet from the Republic of the Congo was a major shaper of 20th century post-colonial African poetry. The Belly, originally published in 1964, reflects the intense political and social changes that followed the country’s 1960 independence from 80 years of colonial occupation. Deeply committed to its homeland, Tchicaya’s work resounds with resilience, determination, and ultimate triumph. 
--Cole Swensen, author of On Walking On and Art in Time

The Belly

Tchicaya U-Tam'Si

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