Tété-Michel Kpomassie was a teenager in Togo when he discovered a book about Greenland—and knew that he must go there. Working his way north over nearly a decade, Kpomassie finally arrived in the country of his dreams. This brilliantly observed and superbly entertaining record of his adventures among the Inuit is a testament both to the wonderful strangeness of the human species and to the surprising sympathies that bind us all.
The gripping true story of one man's ten year expedition from a village in West Africa to the Arctic Circle WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR Scorching heat, rich, fertile soil, and treacherous snakes marked the landscape in which Tété-Michel grew up in 1950s Togo, West Africa. When he discovered a book on Greenland as a teen, this distant land became an instant obsession - he was determined to journey to the place these pages had revealed to him and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime. A book of rich and immersive travel writing, Michel the Giant invites the reader to journey alongside an audacious Kpomassie as he makes his way from the equator to the bitter cold of the artic and settles into life with the Inuit peoples, adapting to their foods and customs. Part memoir, part anthropological observation this captivating narrative teems with nuanced observations on community, belonging and the universality of human experience. This title has been previously published as An African in Greenland
“An entertaining tale rich in schadenfreude as bad things happen to a hapless billionaire” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Jay Gladstone was born to privilege. He is a civic leader and a generous philanthropist, as well as the owner of an NBA team. But in today’s New York, even a wealthy man’s life can spin out of control, no matter the money or influence he possesses. Jay sees himself as a moral man, determined not to repeat his father’s mistakes. He would rather focus on his unstable second marriage and his daughter, Aviva, than worry about questions of race or privilege. However, he moves through a sensitive and aware world: that of Dag Maxwell, the black star forward, and white police officer Russell Plesko, who makes a decision that has resonating consequences—particularly for a DA whose hopes for a future in politics will rest on an explosive prosecution. Set during Barack Obama’s presidency, this artful novel illuminates contemporary America and does not shy away from questions about our scalding social divide—why is conversation about race so fraught, to what degree is the justice system impartial, and does great wealth inoculate those who have it?—and explores the aftermath of unforgivable errors and the unpredictability of the court of public opinion. “Greenland takes a Dickensian delight in letting the plot sprawl with parallels, digressions, false leads, and twists.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A wild and funny page-turner of a novel that grabs you and doesn’t let go.” —Larry David
A fast-moving space adventure featuring mysterious aliens, a journey to a de-populated planet, a mad run from space cops, a ship captain in trouble, and her AI (Artificially Intelligent) companion/ship's computer. It is carnival time on Mars, but Tabitha Jute isn't partying. She is in hiding from the law, penniless and about to lose her livelihood and her best friend, the space barge "Alice Liddell". Then, the intriguing Marco Metz offers her some money to take him to Plenty, and then the adventure begins. Winner of both the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year and the British Science Fiction Association Award for best novel of the year--the only book ever to win both prestigious British awards. Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best novel, 1991 Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1991
Gretel Ehrlich travels across the largest island on Earth, in the company of men and women who have a deep bond with it. She discovers the realm of the great dark, ice pavilions, polar bears and Eskimo nomads.
A captivating meditation on the power of the sentence by the author of Essayism, a 2018 New Yorker book of the year. In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon, whom John Banville has called “a literary flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin,” has written a sequel of sorts to Essayism, turning his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence—from Shakespeare to James Baldwin, John Ruskin to Joan Didion—this new book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature.
Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation. Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves--who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites--gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil. As the nature of the slaves' labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.
Patrick Manning follows the multiple routes that brought Africans and people of African descent into contact with one another and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In joining these stories, he shows how the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean fueled dynamic interactions among black communities and cultures and how these patterns resembled those of a number of connected diasporas concurrently taking shaping across the globe. Manning begins in 1400 and traces the connections that enabled Africans to mutually identify and hold together as a global community. He tracks discourses on race, changes in economic circumstance, the evolving character of family life, and the growth of popular culture. He underscores the profound influence that the African diaspora had on world history and demonstrates the inextricable link between black migration and the rise of modernity. Inclusive and far-reaching, The African Diaspora proves that the advent of modernity cannot be fully understood without taking the African peoples and the African continent into account.
Achille Mbembe is one of the world’s most profound critics of colonialism and its consequences, a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory. His writings examine the complexities of decolonization for African subjectivities and the possibilities emerging in its wake. In Out of the Dark Night, he offers a rich analysis of the paradoxes of the postcolonial moment that points toward new liberatory models of community, humanity, and planetarity. In a nuanced consideration of the African experience, Mbembe makes sweeping interventions into debates about citizenship, identity, democracy, and modernity. He eruditely ranges across European and African thought to provide a powerful assessment of common ways of writing and thinking about the world. Mbembe criticizes the blinders of European intellectuals, analyzing France’s failure to heed postcolonial critiques of ongoing exclusions masked by pretenses of universalism. He develops a new reading of African modernity that further develops the notion of Afropolitanism, a novel way of being in the world that has arisen in decolonized Africa in the midst of both destruction and the birth of new societies. Out of the Dark Night reconstructs critical theory’s historical and philosophical framework for understanding colonial and postcolonial events and expands our sense of the futures made possible by decolonization.
