The German Mujahid

The German Mujahid PDF Author: Boualem Sansal
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609450396
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
“[A] masterly investigation of evil, resistance and guilt, billed as the first Arab novel to confront the Holocaust” from the Nobel Prize–nominated author (Publishers Weekly). Banned in the author’s native Algeria, this groundbreaking novel is based on a true story and inspired by the work of Primo Levi. The Schiller brothers, Rachel and Malrich, couldn’t be more dissimilar. They were born in a small village in Algeria to a German father and an Algerian mother and raised by an elderly uncle in one of the toughest ghettos in France. But the similarities end there. Rachel is a model immigrant—hard working, upstanding, law-abiding. Malrich has drifted. Increasingly alienated and angry, a bleak future seems inevitable for him. But when Islamic fundamentalists murder the young men’s parents in Algeria the destinies of both brothers are transformed. Rachel discovers the shocking truth about his family and buckles under the weight of the sins of his father, a former SS officer. Now Malrich, the outcast, will have to face that same awful truth alone. “The German Mujahid deals with the fine line between the destructive power wielded by Islamic fundamentalism today and the power of another movement that left an indelible mark on history: Nazism.” —Haaretz (Israel) “With extraordinary eloquence, Sansal condemns both the [Algerian] military and the Islamic fundamentalists; he decries that Algeria crippled by trafficking, religion, bureaucracy, the culture of illegality, of coups, and of clans, career apologists, the glorification of tyrants, the love of flashy materialism, and the passion for rants.” —Lire (France) “The German Mujahid, winner of the RTL-Lire Prize for fiction, is a marvelous, devilishly well-constructed novel.” —L’Express (France)

The German Mujahid

The German Mujahid PDF Author: Boualem Sansal
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609450396
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
“[A] masterly investigation of evil, resistance and guilt, billed as the first Arab novel to confront the Holocaust” from the Nobel Prize–nominated author (Publishers Weekly). Banned in the author’s native Algeria, this groundbreaking novel is based on a true story and inspired by the work of Primo Levi. The Schiller brothers, Rachel and Malrich, couldn’t be more dissimilar. They were born in a small village in Algeria to a German father and an Algerian mother and raised by an elderly uncle in one of the toughest ghettos in France. But the similarities end there. Rachel is a model immigrant—hard working, upstanding, law-abiding. Malrich has drifted. Increasingly alienated and angry, a bleak future seems inevitable for him. But when Islamic fundamentalists murder the young men’s parents in Algeria the destinies of both brothers are transformed. Rachel discovers the shocking truth about his family and buckles under the weight of the sins of his father, a former SS officer. Now Malrich, the outcast, will have to face that same awful truth alone. “The German Mujahid deals with the fine line between the destructive power wielded by Islamic fundamentalism today and the power of another movement that left an indelible mark on history: Nazism.” —Haaretz (Israel) “With extraordinary eloquence, Sansal condemns both the [Algerian] military and the Islamic fundamentalists; he decries that Algeria crippled by trafficking, religion, bureaucracy, the culture of illegality, of coups, and of clans, career apologists, the glorification of tyrants, the love of flashy materialism, and the passion for rants.” —Lire (France) “The German Mujahid, winner of the RTL-Lire Prize for fiction, is a marvelous, devilishly well-constructed novel.” —L’Express (France)

An Unfinished Business

An Unfinished Business PDF Author: Boualem Sansal
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408817489
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Rachel and Malrich are the sons of a German father and an Algerian mother. Born in a small village in the Algerian hinterland, they are sent to Paris to be educated. Rachel excels under the French education system to become a successful businessman working for a multinational, but Malrich, 15 years younger, grows up in the banlieue, drops out of school and mixes with the wrong crowd. The brothers keep a wary distance from each other until the day their parents are killed in an Islamic fundamentalist raid. When their father's personal effects reach Paris, Rachel discovers that Hans Schiller was a reputed chemist before the war, who joined the Nazi party and then the Waffen SS. Posted to Auschwitz, he played an active part in the extermination of thousands of people. At the end of the war, he escaped to Egypt. There Nasser lent him to the burgeoning Algerian FLN, and after Independence, he settled in Ain Deb, where he started a family, enjoying the respect given to the mujahideen... Rachel feels compelled to re-examine his heritage and so begins a journey full of foreboding back to Algeria, then on to Germany to trace his father's past and to attempt to come to terms with the Shoah, one of the great taboos of Muslim culture. The attempt proves more than Rachel can bear, and it is left to the streetwise Malrich to take up the trail and complete his brother's unfinished business.

2084

2084 PDF Author: Boualem Sansal
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609453697
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
A “sharply satirical” novel about an oppressive religious dictatorship and one man’s discovery of an underground resistance (Library Journal). 2015 Winner of the Le Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française A tribute to George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 and a cry of protest against totalitarianism of all kinds, Boualem Sansal’s 2084 tells the story of a near future in which religious extremists have established a caliphate that forbids autonomous thought. In the year 2084, in the kingdom of Abistan—named after the prophet Abi, earthly messenger of the god Yölah—citizens submit to a single god, demonstrating their devotion by kneeling in prayer nine times a day. Remembering the past is forbidden, and an omnipresent surveillance system instantly informs the authorities of every deviant act, thought, or idea. The kingdom is blessed and its citizens are happy, filled with purpose and piety. Those who are not—the heretics—are put to death by stoning or beheading in city squares. But Ati has met people who think differently: In ghettos and caves, hidden from the authorities, exist the last living heretics and free-thinkers of Abistan. Under their influence, Ati begins to doubt. He begins to think. Now, he will have to defend his thoughts with his life. 2084 is “a rare, powerful book, at the intersection of fable and lampoon, of satire and science fiction,” a cry of freedom, a gripping novel of ideas, and an indictment of the kind of closed-minded fundamentalism that threatens our democracies and the ideals on which they are founded (Lire). “Alison Anderson’s deft and intelligent translation [conveys] Sansal’s abhorrence of a system that controls people’s minds, while explaining that the religion was not originally evil but has been corrupted. A moving and cautionary story.” —The Times Literary Supplement “A powerful novel that celebrates resistance.” —The Guardian

Animalia

Animalia PDF Author: Jean-Baptiste Del Amo
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802147585
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
This “lyrically descriptive [novel] traces the terrible evolution of rural ways of life into cruelty and abuse via the history of one unhappy family.” —Kirkus Reviews 1898: In the small French village of Puy-Larroque, Éléonore is a child living with her father, a pig farmer whose terminal illness leaves him unable to work, and her God-fearing mother, who runs both farm and family with an iron hand. Éléonore passes her childhood with little heat and no running water, sharing a small room with her cousin Marcel, who does most of the physical labor on the farm. When World War I breaks out and the village empties, Éléonore gets a taste of the changes that will transform her world as the twentieth century rolls on. In the second part of the novel, which takes place in the 1980s, the untamed world of Puy-Larroque seems gone forever. Éléonore has aged into the role of matriarch, and the family is running a large industrial pig farm, where thousands of pigs churn daily through cycles of birth, growth, and death. Moments of sublime beauty and powerful emotion mix with the thoughtless brutality waged against animals that makes the old horrors of death and disease seem like simpler times. A dramatic and chilling tale of man and beast that recalls the naturalism of writers like Émile Zola, Animalia traverses the twentieth century as it examines man’s quest to conquer nature, critiques the legacy of modernity and the transmission of violence from one generation to the next, and questions whether we can hold out hope for redemption in this brutal world. From a Goncourt Prize winner, this “lyrical novel depicting a century on a French family farm emphasizes the earthy and the cruel [and] provocatively dissects our conflicted relationship with the rest of the living world”(Booklist). “[Animalia] invites readers to connect the tangled web of violence, against people and animals—and face the brutality in which all of us are complicit.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio PDF Author: Amara Lakhous
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609450434
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 107

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Book Description
The immigrant tenants of a building in Rome offer skewed accounts of a murder in this prize-winning satire by the Algerian-born Italian author (Publishers Weekly). Piazza Vittorio is home to a polyglot community of immigrants who have come to Rome from all over the world. But when a tenant is murdered in the building’s elevator, the delicate balance is thrown into disarray. As each of the victim’s neighbors is questioned by the police, readers are offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome. With language as colorful as the neighborhood it describes, each character takes his or her turn “giving evidence.” Their various stories reveal much about the drama of racial identity and the anxieties of a life spent on society’s margins, but also bring to life the hilarious imbroglios of this melting pot Italian culture. “Their frequently wild testimony teases out intriguing psychological and social insight alongside a playful whodunit plot.” —Publishers Weekly

Harraga

Harraga PDF Author: Boualem Sansal
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620402246
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Grudgingly taking her absent brother's flamboyant and pregnant girlfriend into her home in Algeria, long-time recluse Lamia comes to love the rebellious teen, who she worriedly searches for when the latter runs away into a hostile, fundamentalism-driven outside world.

Divorce Islamic Style

Divorce Islamic Style PDF Author: Amara Lakhous
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 160945894X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
Secret identities, criminal conspiracies, and forbidden love converge in this “whimsical and at times heartbreaking look” at the Muslim communities of Rome (The New York Times). The Italian secret service believes that a group of Muslim immigrants is planning a terrorist attack. Christian Mazzari, a young Sicilian translator who speaks perfect Arabic, goes undercover in Rome’s Egyptian neighborhood, Viale Marconi, to infiltrate the group. Posing as a recently arrived Tunisian in search of a job and a place to sleep, Christian soon meets Sofia, a young Egyptian immigrant whose arranged marriage is anything but fulfilling. While Christian attempts in vain to uncover terrorist activity, Sofia is on another kind of secret mission—in defiance of a husband who forbids her to work. In alternating voices, Algerian-born Italian author Amara Lakhous examines the commonplaces and stereotypes of life in modern, multicultural Italy. Divorce Islamic Style mixes the rational and the absurd as it depicts the conflicts and contradictions of today's globalized world.

Windows on the World

Windows on the World PDF Author: Frédéric Beigbeder
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007395485
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 15

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Book Description
A daring, moving fictional account of the last moments of a father and his two sons atop the World Trade Centre on September 11.

Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet

Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet PDF Author: Amara Lakhous
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609451953
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
An Italian journalist gets wrapped up in the criminality and cultural controversies of modern Turin in this “very funny” satirical novel (The New York Times). It’s October 2006. The northern Italian town of Turin has been rocked by a series of murders involving Albanians and Romanians, and journalist Enzo Laganà is determined to get to the bottom of the crime wave—even if he must invent a few sources to do so. But first he’s been conscripted to mediate the issue of a pig running loose in a mosque. Gino the pig belongs to Enzo’s Nigerian immigrant neighbor, Joseph. The Muslim community wants Gino killed, an animal rights group wants him saved, and Joseph is pleading his pig’s innocence. As Enzo navigates various calamities large and small, he scrambles to keep track of his lies even as he uncovers some uncomfortable truths about contemporary, multicultural Italy. “This very funny novel examines a town’s heightened ignorance and hostility toward foreigners, and what it means to be a “true” Italian, even if the native in question is a small pig.” —The New York Times

The Wind Traveler

The Wind Traveler PDF Author: Alonso Cueto
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477317740
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
A Peruvian literary master returns with a provocative novel about the intersection of retribution and reconciliation--and a soldier's quest to confront the ghosts of his past after the Shining Path's reign of terror has ended.