Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy by Marie Vieux-Chauvet Permanent Exile A review by Madison Smartt Bell For the last thirty years of the twentieth century, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Amour, colere et folie was legendary for being lost. Published in France by Gallimard in 1968, this triptych of thematically linked novellas soon caused alarming ripples in the author's native Haiti, where the Vieux-Chauvet family had already lost three of its members to the regime of state terror erected by Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, beginning in 1957. Warned that the book would almost certainly provoke serious reprisals, Vieux-Chauvet persuaded Gallimard to withdraw it, while she went into permanent exile in New York City, where she died in 1973 at 57. Her husband, Pierre Chauvet, made an emergency trip to Haiti, where he purchased as many copies of the book already in circulation there as he could recover -- in order to destroy them. Remnants of the Gallimard edition were discreetly sold by Vieux-Chauvet's children, in very few venues, until the stock was exhausted in 2000, and a pirated edition made a... Read the entire review More reviews from The Nation

The Armies by Evelio Rosero

Evelio Rosero's The Armies begins almost idyllically, in a garden. To the bright laughter of macaws, old Ismael Pasos picks oranges. His wife, the slightly less-old Otilia, feeds the fish in the fountain as their cats peer down from an almond tree. In this Eden, it is desire, not satisfaction, that ...

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Sometimes journalists can only describe, not explain. Certainly that was the case when the tattered freight ship the Golden Venture beached itself on New York's Rockaway peninsula in June 1993, disgorging from its fetid hold a cargo of 286 undocumented Chinese, ten of whom died while struggling to...

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"You know people have tried to put me off as being crazy," said Thelonious Sphere Monk. "Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy." He ought to have known. Monk was one of only a few jazz musicians to appear on the cover of Time magazine (others include Louis Armstrong...

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The first thing Peter Maass encountered when he arrived at Oru Sangama was the stench of raw sewage. The trip from Port Harcourt had not been long, even in a leaky canoe, but the tiny slum seemed a world apart from the sprawling, oil-rich hub of the Niger Delta. Sangama's villagers, housed in a...

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It is said that the tradition of English poetry began with Caedmon -- an illiterate seventh-century lay brother who, ashamed of his inability to versify when the harp was passed around at a feast, fell asleep in his stable among the animals and dreamed of an angel. This angel, too, bade him sing...

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"Russian literature has been a kind of religion in this country -- a religion based on the moral position of writers, on their suffering," Ludmilla Petrushevskaya once told Sally Laird, her British translator. "All our greatest writers have been sufferers and saints." It was May 1987, and Immortal...

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In 2004, in an essay in the Mexican magazine Letras Libres, Horacio Castellanos Moya recalled how, on a rainy August afternoon in San Salvador in 1978, he and two friends, all three of them poets in their early 20s, were interrupted by a knock on the door as they put together the ninth issue of...

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In Washington, they read. Foreign policy decisions made by men and women in suits, understandably too busy to embark on a fact-finding mission to every war zone, disaster area or human rights debacle, often depend on the labor of reporters (who report) and experts (who filter raw eyewitness...

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Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is a writer even most Russians knew nothing about until his work was resurrected from Soviet archives and published -- most of it for the first time -- in the late 1980s. He was ethnically Polish and grew up near Kiev. He studied law without much enthusiasm, worked for an...

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It is one of the most perplexing mysteries of world cinema. In the early 1970s Dusan Makavejev was the brightest star in the avant-garde firmament. A breathless dispatch in the New York Times filed from a midnight screening of one of Makavejev's films at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival offers a...

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The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard

Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics) by Don Carpenter

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley

The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov by Jack Tworkov

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The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business by Nelson Lichtenstein

Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life by Gerald Martin

Selected Poems by Wallace Stevens

Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen

War Is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War by James Neugass and Peter N. Carroll and Peter Glazer

Dancing to the Precipice: The Life of Lucie de La Tour Du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era by Caroline Moorehead

Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 by Matthew J. Smith

C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems by C P Cavafy

Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America by Anne-marie Cusac

Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North by Thomas Sugrue

Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image (Vintage Originals) by Michael Casey

Bonsai (Contemporary Art of the Novella) by Alejandro Zambra

Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto

The Ax by Donald E. Westlake

News from the Empire by Fernando Del Paso

The Dickson Baseball Dictionary by Paul Dickson

Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides by Anne Carson

Don't Cry: Stories by Mary Gaitskill

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gerard Prunier

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin

The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills by John H. Summers

The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation by Fanny Howe

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

The Road to Democracy in Iran (Boston Review Books) by Akbar Ganji

Amerika -- The Missing Person: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text by Franz Kafka

Isaac's Torah: Concerning the Life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld Through Two World Wars, Three Concentration Camps and Five Motherlands by Angel Wagenstein

The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman

George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals by Nelson W. Aldrich

Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America by William Graebner

Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury by Alison Light

Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang by John Ayto

Yalo (Rainmaker Translations) by Elias Khoury

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple

How Fiction Works by James Wood

Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer by Wendell E. Pritchett

Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution by Pardis Mahdavi

Sophocles' Ajax by John Tipton

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up by Yiwu Liao

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century by Tony Judt

Only Love Can Break Your Heart by David Samuels

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