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 ...

At several points in the haunting Dukla, Andrzej Stasiuk claims that what he is trying to do is "write a book about light." The result is a beautiful, lyrical series of evocations of a very specific locale at different times of the year, in different kinds of weather, and with different human landscapes. Dukla, in fact, is a real place: a small resort town not far from where Stasiuk now lives. Taking an usual form—a short essay, a novella, and then a series of brief portraits of l...

A propulsively prying sketch of French village life from Nobel laureate Roger Martin du Gard, an admired contemporary of André Gide & Albert CamusThe Mail Carrier opens with the pink shadows of dawn and closes in the red glow of sunset’s rays. In between, a day unfolds like a crumpled missive that has fallen into the wrong hands. As Joigneau the postman sets off on his rounds, he already knows more than he lets on (he has a habit of steaming open envelopes...

This thoughtful exploration examines the complex and multifaceted transition of retirement from academia, addressing fundamental questions of when and how to retire, and what retirement looks like. The work challenges assumptions about ageing while acknowledging the profound sense of loss that often accompanies the end of an academic career.Through engaging autoethnographies, this book reveals both challenges and opportunities inherent in this significant life stage, offering uniqu...

A rich, polyphonic novel from one of the leading voices of contemporary Polish literature, encompassing a half-century of history and memoryIn a Polish village, a young man watches an old man trip and fall down a flight of stairs. From this singular event arises a cascade of memories, regrets, and longings: the buried sensations of a whole lifetime, condensed and released. We hear of life during occupation, the scarcities of a childhood lived under the sign of war—...

A slim, emotionally and thematically rich book of poetry, a grammar of the world is Jeanne Benameur's second book published in English by Les Fugitives, offering a more personal look into the author's own history and writing practice. For Benameur, the Egyptian goddess Isis is a sister who advances with her along the seashore. Like her, poetry responds to life's call where the blue of the sky mingles with the blue of the sea. She is unity rediscovered. Drawing on subjects as diverse as the...

A haunting, allegorical Swiss masterpiece centered around a posse of villagers as they brave dark elements to ascend a mountain, thicketed with loreTeeming with tension, this immersive, rhapsodic story transports readers to the Swiss mountainside, bringing to mind the writing of Thomas Mann while offering character studies as vivid and bracing as Eudora Welty’s.Feed is running low in a rural village in Switzerland. The town council meets to decide whether o...

One of the final novellas by the acclaimed French writer Jean Giono, Ennemonde is a fierce and jubilant portrait of a life intensely livedEnnemonde Girard: Obese. Toothless. Razor-sharp. Loving mother and murderous wife: a character like none other in literature. In telling us Ennemonde’s astounding story of undetected crimes, Jean Giono immerses us in the perverse and often lurid lifeways of the people of the High Country, where vengeance is an art form, ...

One morning the beautiful Ichrak is found murdered in a street in Casablanca. All the men feared her as much as they desired her . . . . In a city buffeted by the Chergui, a violent wind emanating from the Sahara, the investigation becomes a prism through which a group portrait of a working-class district emerges.In Casablanca Story, In Koli Jean Bofane trains his razor-sharp observations of a bitter reality and his mordant humor on corruption among the powerful, shady pro...

In an anonymous French village a child loves to wander a forest where his mother may have disappeared. His father is speechless with anger; his grandmother is concealing her own story.

Kamil, a Warsaw sociologist, is summoned to Geneva to participate in an oral history project about the collapse of Eastern European communism and resolves to tell his own story through a gallery of portraits of the many women he has loved. These reminiscences emerge against the broader canvas of circumstances and events that have shaped the past sixty years of Poland’s turbulent, tragic history. Soon he finds himself inexorably drawn to his interrogator from the “free” world; the chronicle...

Written in a pared-down, direct language, and filled with allusions to everything from philosophy to TV talk shows, the poetry of Tadeusz Rózewicz encompasses the complexity of human experience in the early 21st century. Rózewicz's unique voice, formed during his experiences as a member of the Polish resistance in World War II, and honed by decades living under communist rule, holds a merciless mirror up to the crimes and excesses of the poet's lifetime. In his eighties now, Rózewicz conti...