Literature and Fiction

From one of Africa’s greatest living writers, a ghostly reckoning with Congolese history

“Alain Mabanckou addresses the reader with exuberant inventiveness in novels that are brilliantly imaginative in their forms of storytelling. His voice is vividly colloquial, mischievous and often outrageous as he explores, from multiple angles, the country where he grew up, drawing on its political conflicts and compromises, disappointments and hopes. He acts the jester, but with serious intent and lacerating effect.” —Man Booker International Prize judges’ citation

One day in the Congolese town of Pointe-Noire, Liwa Ekimakingaï wakes to find himself in a cemetery where, three days earlier, he had been buried at the age of twenty-two in a pair of flared purple trousers in which he is now trapped forever. All around him are the other residents of the cemetery, all of whom have their own complex stories of life and death to share.

Bewildered by his predicament and unwilling to relinquish his tender bond with his devoted grandmother, Liwa makes his way back home to see her one last time, against all spectral advice. As he does, disturbing rumors swirl together with Liwa’s jumbled memories of his last night on earth, leading him to try and solve the mystery of his own untimely demise.

Sure to appeal to readers of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Dealing with the Dead is an exuberant, phantasmagorical tale of ambition, community, and forces beyond human control, and a scathing satire on corruption and political violence by one of the most recognized chroniclers of modern Central Africa.

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book

The darkly comic tale of three generations of a Jewish family, from one of Poland’s most renowned contemporary authors 

“A novel sparing only in words and form, not in emotion.”
—Vogue (Poland)

Confidential follows on the success of acclaimed photographer, psychologist, and writer Mikołaj Grynberg’s highly acclaimed short story collection, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To, which was a finalist for numerous awards, including Poland’s most prestigious literary prize, the Nike, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the National Translation Award in Prose for Sean Gasper Bye’s translation.

This powerful new novella is a darkly comic portrait of a Jewish family in today’s Poland, struggling to express their love for one another in the face of a past that cannot and will not be forgotten. The grandfather is a doctor, a Holocaust survivor who has now vowed to live only for pleasure. His son, born at the start of the war, becomes a well-respected physicist, but finds himself emotionally unable to attend conferences in Germany, despite the benefit it would give his career. The mother is loving but firm, though she has a secret habit of attending strangers’ funerals so that she can cry.

A masterpiece of concision, Confidential expands on one of the stories in I’d Like to Say Sorry . . . , tackling themes of memory, trauma, and care, as well as enduring anti-Semitism, with unforgettable power, emotional complexity, and Grynberg’s trademark black humor.

Published for the first time in English, the debut novel of Marguerite Duras—renowned author of The Lover and The War—is the story of a family’s moral reckoning and a daughter’s fall from grace

Marguerite Duras rose to global stardom with her erotic masterpiece The Lover (L’Amant), which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, has over a million copies in print in English, has been translated into forty-three languages, and was adapted into a canonical film in 1992. While almost all of Duras’s novels have been translated into English, her debut The Impudent Ones (Les Impudents) has been a glaring exception—until now. Fans of Duras will be thrilled to discover the germ of her bold, vital prose and signature blend of memoir and fiction in this intense and mournful story of the Taneran family, which introduces Duras’s classic themes of familial conflict, illicit romance, and scandal in the sleepy suburbs and southwest provinces of France.

Duras’s great gift was her ability to bring vivid and passionate life to characters with whom society may not have sympathized, but with whom readers certainly do. With storytelling that evokes in equal parts beauty and brutality, The Impudent Ones depicts the scalding effects of seduction and disrepute on the soul of a young French girl.

Including an essay on the story behind The Impudent Ones by Jean Vallier—biographer of the late Duras—which contextualizes the origins of Duras’s debut novel, this one-of-a-kind publishing endeavor will delight established Duras fans and a new generation of readers alike.

A New York Times Top Historical Fiction Pick of 2020

A stunningly original new novel exploring race, truth in authorship, and the legacy of past exploitation, from the Windham-Campbell lifetime achievement award winner

When Zoëml; Wicomb burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, she was hailed by her literary contemporaries and reviewers alike. Since then, her carefully textured writing has cemented her reputation as being among the most distinguished writers working today and earned her one of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes for Lifetime Achievement in Fiction Writing.

Wicomb’s majestic new novel Still Life juggles with our perception of time and reality as Wicomb tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet Thomas Pringle, whose only legacy is in South Africa where he is dubbed the “Father of South African Poetry.” In her efforts to resurrect Pringle, the writer summons the specter of Mary Prince, the West Indian slave whose History Pringle had once published, along with Hinza, his adopted black South African son.

At their side is Sir Nicholas Green, a seasoned time traveler (and a character from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando). Their adventures, as they travel across space and time to unlock the mysteries of Pringle’s life, offer a poignant exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.

The internationally celebrated (and Booker Prize–shortlisted) author returns with a dazzling coming-of-age story set in post-independence Sri Lanka

“A master storyteller.”
—The New York Times

Ceylon is on the brink of change. But young Kairo is at loose ends. School is closed, the government is in disarray, the press is under threat, and the religious right are flexing their muscles. Kairo’s hardworking mother blows off steam at her cha-cha-cha classes; his Trotskyist father grumbles over the state of the nation between his secret bets on horse races in faraway England. All Kairo wants to do is hide in his room and flick through secondhand westerns and superhero comics, or escape on his bicycle and daydream.

Then he meets the magnetic teenage Jay, and his whole world is turned inside out.

A budding naturalist and a born rebel, Jay keeps fish and traps birds for an aviary he is building in the garden of his grand home. As Jay guides Kairo from the realm of make-believe into one of hunting guns and fast cars and introduces him to a girl— Niromi—Kairo begins to understand the price of privilege and embarks on a journey of devastating consequence.

Taut and luminous, graceful and wild, Suncatcher is a poignant coming-of-age novel about difficult friendships and sudden awakenings set among the tumult of 1960s Sri Lanka, that confirms Gunesekera’s status as one of today’s most lyrical writers.

The “heart-breaking” (New York Times Book Review), rollicking, award-winning novel that has been described as “Oliver Twist in 1970s Africa” (Les Inrockuptibles)

“One of the most compelling books you’ll read in any language this year.” —Rolling Stone

Winner of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize

Shortlisted for the Albertine Prize

Shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize

Longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize

Greeted with wildly enthusiastic reviews on publication, Alain Mabanckou’s riotous novel begins in an orphanage in 1970s Congo-Brazzaville run by a malicious political stooge who makes the life of our hero, Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko—his name means “Let us thank God, the black Moses is born on the lands of the ancestors,” but most people just call him Moses—very difficult.

Moses is also terrorized by his two fellow orphans—the twins Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala—but after Moses exacts revenge on them by lacing their food with hot pepper, the twins take Moses under their wing, escape the orphanage, and move to the bustling port town of Pointe-Noire, where they form a gang that survives on petty theft.

What follows is a “pointed” (Los Angeles Times), “vivid and funny” (New York Times), larger-than-life tale that chronicles Moses’s ultimately tragic journey through the Pointe-Noire underworld and the politically repressive reality of Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s and ’80s.

“Ringing with beautiful poetry,” (Wall Street Journal) Black Moses is a vital new extension of Mabanckou’s cycle of Pointe-Noire novels that stand out as one of the grandest and funniest fictional projects of our time.

Longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize

“Its simplicity lends it grandeur. One thinks of Maxim Gorky, or even the early sketches of Tolstoy.”
—The Wall Street Journal

A novel of war, revolution, youth, and friendship by the “remarkable” (Ian McEwan) French author of A Meal in Winter

Hubert Mingarelli’s simple, powerful, and moving stories of men in combat have established him as one of the most exciting new voices in international fiction.

In Four Soldiers he tells the story of four young soldiers in 1919, members of the Red Army during the Russian civil war. It is set in the harsh dead of winter, just as the soldiers set up camp in a forest in Galicia near the Romanian front line. Due to a lull in fighting, their days are taken up with the mundane tasks of trying to scratch together what food and comforts they can find, all the time while talking, smoking, and waiting. Waiting specifically for spring to come. Waiting for their battalion to move on. Waiting for the inevitable resumption of violence.

Recalling great works like Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Four Soldiers is a timeless and tender story of young male friendships and the small, idyllic moments of happiness that can illuminate the darkness of war.

The “heart-stopping” (The Millions), “richly layered” (Brooklyn Rail), “haunting, beautiful” (BuzzFeed) story of an escaped captive and the killer hound that pursues him

“Slave Old Man is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed—but every page pulses, blood-warm. . . . The prose is so electrifyingly synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to rub my eyes in disbelief.”
—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man was published to accolades in hardcover in a brilliant translation by Linda Coverdale, winning the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and chosen as a Publishers WeeklyBest Book of 2018.

Now in paperback, Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly enslaved person’s daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his enslaver and a fearsome hound on his heels. We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man’s flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing—even otherworldly—ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself.

Chamoiseau’s exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the Creole culture of early nineteenth-century Martinique, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.

This acclaimed novel imagining the life of Israeli soldier Shalom Nagar explores the legacy of the Holocaust: “A fascinating book that doesn’t let you go” (Neue Deutschland, Germany).
 
In May 1962, twenty-two men gathered in Jerusalem to decide by lot who would be Adolf Eichmann’s executioner. These men had guarded the former Nazi SS lieutenant colonel during his imprisonment and trial, and with no trained executioners in Israel, it would fall to one of them to end Eichmann’s life. Shalom Nagar, the only one among them who had asked not to participate, drew the short straw.
 
Decades later, Nagar is living on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, haunted by his memory of Eichmann. He remembers watching him day and night, the way he ate, the way he slept—and the sound of the cord tensing around his neck. But as he tells and re-tells his story to anyone who will listen, he begins to doubt himself. When one of his friends, Moshe, reveals his link to Eichmann, Nagar is forced to reconsider everything he has ever believed about his past.
 
In the tradition of postwar trauma literature that includes Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Eichmann’s Executioner raises provocative questions about how we represent the past, and how those representations impinge upon the present.
 
“Both curiously transparent and full of secrets, a simultaneously dense yet airy fabric of cryptic threads and references. . . . Nothing is gratuitous in this book, nothing coincidental; all is intricately interlaced.” —Frankfurter Rundschau, Germany

From one of the world’s greatest writers, the story of how the author found his voice as a novelist at Makerere University in Uganda as a student

In this acclaimed memoir, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o recounts the four years he spent at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda—crucial years during which he found his voice as a journalist, short story writer, playwright, and novelist just as colonial empires were crumbling and new nations were being born—under the shadow of the rivalries, intrigues, and assassinations of the Cold War.

Haunted by the memories of the carnage and mass incarceration carried out by the British colonial-settler state in his native Kenya but inspired by the titanic struggle against it, Ngũgĩ, then known as James Ngugi, begins to weave stories from the fibers of memory, history, and a shockingly vibrant and turbulent present.

What unfolds in this moving and thought-provoking memoir is simultaneously the birth of one of the most important living writers—lauded for his “epic imagination” (Los Angeles Times)—the death of one of the most violent episodes in global history, and the emergence of new histories and nations with uncertain futures.

A “brilliant [novel] . . . Immediate and compelling, this one deserves a place on the shelf next to Trainspotting or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (Cleaver Magazine).
 
In small-town suburban Australia, three young men from three different ethnic backgrounds—one Samoan, one Macedonian, one not sure—are ready to make their mark. Solomon is all charisma, authority, and charm; a failed basketball player down for the moment but surely not out. His half-brother, Jimmy, bounces along in his wake, underestimated, waiting for his chance to announce himself. Aleks, their childhood friend, loves his mates, his family, and his homeland and would do anything for them. The question is, does he know where to draw the line?
 
Solomon, Jimmy, and Aleks are way out on the fringe of Australia, looking for a way in. Hip hop, basketball, and graffiti give them a voice. Booze, women, and violence pass the time while they wait for their chance. Under the oppressive summer sun, their town has turned tinder-dry. All it will take is a spark.
 
As the surrounding hills roar with flames, change storms in. But it’s not what they were waiting for. It never is.
 
“This stunning novel has such swaggering exuberance that it will make most other fiction you read this year seem criminally dull. You have been warned.” —Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting
 
“With compassion and urgency, Here Come the Dogs excavates the pain of those who struggle to remain part of a ruthless equation that has been determined by others.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“A bravado novel about survival and rebirth in a subculture that moves to its own rhythms.” —Kirkus Reviews

Seven short stories by the Prix Goncourt winner—“the most distinctive voice of his generation . . . master magician of the contemporary French novel” (The Washington Post).
 
France’s preeminent fiction writer, Jean Echenoz is celebrated for his ability to craft stories with such precision that readers are caught off guard by the intense emotion and imagination just beneath the placid surface of his writing. As Gary Indiana put it in his essay “Conjuror of St. Germain”, “Echenoz risks everything in his fiction, gambling on the prodigious blandishments of his voice to lure his readers into a maze of improbabilities and preposterous happenings.”
 
The Queen’s Caprice—seven stories available in English for the first time—reveals Echenoz at the height of his talents, taking readers on a journey across radically different landscapes. The title story explores a tiny corner of the French countryside; “Nelson” offers a brilliant miniaturist portrait of the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar; “In Babylon” sketches the ancient city of Mesopotamia, based on trace descriptions from Herodotus; and other stories visit the forests of England, the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, Tampa Bay, and the interior of a submarine. Amid the thrill and allure of this voyage of words, “again and again we pause to savor the richness of Echenoz’s startling, crystalline observations” (Lydia Davis).
 
“[A] terrific sense of humor tinged with existential mischief.” —L’Express

Winner of the inaugural French Voices Award: “[A] masterfully conceived debut, arelentless tale, intricately and irresistibly told” (La Quinzaine Littéraire).
 
Only once in a great while does a new novel come along that takes a literary scene by storm, demonstrating real innovation in the craft of storytelling. Julia Deck provides this force in Viviane—the first debut novel in a generation to be released by the most prestigious literary publisher in Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit. This breakthrough novel—nominated for the Prix Femina, the Prix du Livre Inter, and the Prix du Premier Roman and already a bestseller in France—is sure to become a contemporary classic.
 
Viviane is both an engrossing murder mystery and a gripping exploration of madness, a narrative that tests the shifting boundaries of language and the self. For inspiration, Deck read the work of Samuel Beckett, because, as she says, “he positions himself within chaos and gives it coherence.” How can we say that we are who we say we are? What determines our actions, and are we really responsible for them? For Viviane Élisabeth Fauville, these are not abstract questions to be left for philosophers; they will decide whether she will get away with murder.
 
Translated by one of the most celebrated literary translators working in French and written in irresistible, lucid prose, Viviane takes us to the knife’s edge of sanity. This gem of a novel does what only great literature can do: turn us inside out.
 
“Written with a delirious and intimate urgency . . . A remarkable and troubling portrait of murder and madness.” —Lily Tuck, National Book Award–winning author