Publisher: Viking, 2007
Translated by Nancy Huston from L’esprit de l’athéisme, Albin Michel, 2006

Can we do without religion? Can we have ethics without God? Is there such thing as “atheist spirituality”? In this powerful book, the internationally bestselling author André Comte-Sponville presents a philosophical exploration of atheism. Comte-Sponville offers rigorous, reasoned arguments that take both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions into account, and through his clear, concise, and often humorous prose, he offers a convincing treatise on a new form of spiritual life.

Publisher: The New Press, 2007, with a preface by Adam Gopnick
Translated by Linda Coverdale from Ravel, Editions de Minuit, 2006

A bestseller in France, Ravel is a beguiling and original evocation of the last ten years in the life of a musical genius, written by the acclaimed novelist Jean Echenoz, winner of the Prix Goncourt. The book opens in 1927 as Maurice Ravel—dandy, eccentric, and curmudgeon—voyages across the Atlantic aboard the luxurious ocean liner the France to begin his triumphant grand tour across the United States, where he will travel aboard such fabled trains as the Zephyr, the Hiawatha, and the Sunset Limited, smoking his precious stash of Gauloises along the way.

Rarely has the difficult craft of storytelling been as well mastered.
The Times Literary Supplement

The most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel.
The Washington Post

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2008
Translated by Catherine Temerson from Origines, Grasset, 2004

Origins recounts the family history of the generation of Maalouf’s paternal grandfather, Boutros Maalouf. Maalouf sets out to discover the truth about why Boutros, a poet and educator in Lebanon, traveled across the globe to rescue his younger brother, Gabrayel, who had settled in Havana. What follows is the gripping excavation of a family’s hidden past. Origins is at once a gripping family chronicle and a timely consideration of Lebanese culture and politics.

"Maalouf's novels re-create the thrill of childhood reading, that primitive mixture of learning about something unknown or unimagined."
Claire Messud, The Guardian

Dark Heart of the Night
by Leonora Miano

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, spring 2010
Translated by Tamsin Black from L’intérieur de la nuit, Plon, 2005

What is Africa’s own “heart of darkness”? It is what confronts Ayané 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. When invading militia organize a horrific ceremony that they claim will help reunite Africa, Ayané is forced to confront the monstrosity of the act that follows, as well as the responsibility that all the villagers must bear for silently accepting evil done in their name.

Through Ayané’s unwilling witness, Léonora Miano probes the themes of submission and responsibility and questions the role of Africans in the suffering of their fellows. Also exploring African identity, Dark Heart of the Night is a profoundly disturbing novel in its evocation of the darkest side of people driven by their instinct to survive.

“In a style that is beautifully controlled and shows no trace of exoticism, Léonora Miano plunges her readers agonizingly into the mysteries of Africa: rebellions, coups d’état, archaic sacrifices, and battles between clans. Her observations are merciless and uncompromising.”
Josyane Savigneau, Le Monde des Livres

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing, 2007, with a preface by Siri Hustvedt
Translated by Adriana Hunter from Déloger l’animal, Actes Sud, 2005

Fifteen-year-old Rose is trying to make sense of her world. Her mother a beautiful woman with signature stiletto heels, bright clothes, and the synthetic gleam of a blond wig has vanished, and Rose is convinced that she must be in danger. Unable to cope with the possibility of having been abandoned, Rose uses her vivid imagination to construct her own explanation for her mother s sudden disappearance.

“I wanted to tell stories but I was after a style, after boldness, spirit, enhancement, and embroidering...I wanted things to have neither substance nor form but rather the two linked together and inseparable. I wanted malleable sentences and movement. I didn’t want to let go of form and at the same time I wanted to construct a powerful plot, give each of the characters depth, breathing mysterious and unshakable life into them.”
Véronique Ovaldé in To My American Readers

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, spring 2009
Translated by David and Nicole Ball from Aux Etats-Unis d’Afrique, J-C Lattès, 2005

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. It is in this world that an African doctor on a humanitarian mission to France adopts a child. Now a young artist, this girl, Malaïka, travels to the troubled land of her birth in hope of finding her mother—and perhaps something of her lost self. Her search, at times funny and strange, is also deeply poignant, reminding us at every moment of the turns of fate we call truth.

"Djibouti-born Waberi''s brief and concentrated tale-part satire, part fable, part fever-dream-imagines the world turned upside down: a war rages between Quebec and the American Midwest, and all of "Euramerica" is a dark, barbaric hellhole. In the United States of Africa, however. . . peace and prosperity reign. . . . It''s there that a dreamy, restless young artist named Maya ponders her history. . . . Waberi manages to convince of the power of art and love to heal very real rifts."
Publishers Weekly

"It reads like a tale by Voltaire, but darker and more striking. . . . The polemicist's weapons give way to the ironist's verve and the sparkling grace of the futuristic tale."
Le Nouvel Observateur

"Waberi wittily destroys a whole series of clichés and prejudices about Africa-questionable views about immigration as well as the unhealthy side of humanitarian aid organizations draped in arrogance. . . . But this novel is also full of hope."
Le Monde Diplomatique

Publisher: Markus Wiener, May 2008
Translated by George A. Holoch Jr from Les islamistes marocains, Editions La Découverte, 2005

Malika Zeghal analyzes the historical roots and recent evolution of Moroccan Islamist movements in the context of a new political system that combines pluralistic electoral competition with authoritarian government. To elucidate these ideological and institutional transformations, she stresses the role of `ulama and Islamic institutions and the history of their tense and unequal relationship with an authoritarian monarchy constrained by the religious origins of its legitimacy. She analyzes the transformations in the movements' political strategies and religious discourses generated by the legalized Islamist party's integration into the political process. This book provides an original perspective on the prospects for democratization in an Arab country and the role religion plays in that process. In a clear and compelling presentation that encompasses reactions to the 2003 suicide attacks in Casablanca and the legislative election of 2007, the author combines historical analysis with her perspective, as a political scientist, on the rapidly changing dynamics of Islam and politics in Morocco.

"Extremely rigorous and lucid, the book by Malika Zeghal, who is also the author of a work of reference on Egypt, includes a comparative dimension that makes her analysis of Morocco even more enlightening."
Olivier Mongin - Esprit

"In an insightful analysis (an updated translation), Zeghal (anthropology and sociology of religions, Chicago) describes the complex political competition primarily contested by monarchs, ulama, and Islamists in Morocco to define and determine "public Islam." The author presents a constellation of actors--Sufis, sharifs, and salafis as well as kings. Hassan II, Muhammad VI, Allal al-Fassi, Abdessalam and Nadia Yassine, and the al-Kittani family receive particular attention. Zeghal especially examines the monarch's traditional role of political arbiter, monopolizing power and fragmenting opposition, as exemplified by the legalization of the Islamist Party of Justice and Development in the late 1990s to neutralize the Justice and Benevolence Movement. The 2003 terrorist bombings forced King Muhammad VI to project a greater authoritative role as "commander of the faithful." Nevertheless, the current condition of state Islam has significantly "shifted the definition of Islam toward a bureaucracy rather than focusing it on the ... monarch, his public piety and genealogy." Specialists will appreciate this detailed book. Includes a glossary. Summing Up: Highly recommended."
Choice Magazine