The Dark Child is a vivid and graceful memoir of Camara Laye's youth in the village of Kouroussa, French Guinea, a place steeped in mystery. Laye marvels over his mother's supernatural powers, his father's distinction as the village goldsmith, and his own passage into manhood, which is marked by animistic beliefs and bloody rituals. Eventually, he must choose between this unique place and the academic success that lures him to distant cities. More than autobiography of one boy, this is the universal story of sacred traditions struggling against the encroachment of a modern world. A passionate and deeply affecting record, The Dark Child is a classic of African literature.

Turn your rusty French language skills into polished conversation confidence Tune Up Your French offers you an entertaining and practical way to hone your French-language conversation skills. This book is structured around numerous key areas for improvement, covering everything from tricky grammatical structures to gestures, slang, and humor. In each area, key phrases are presented in “Top Ten” lists, including everyday expressions for filling pauses, icebreakers, and more. This book is excellent for brushing up on the French you studied in high school or college. The available audio download contains an engaging 70-minute program for learning key expressions from the book. It includes recordings of sixty Top 10 lists, organized for easy access and reference.

Camara Laye (1928?80) traveled to France from his native Guinea in 1947 on a scholarship to study automobile mechanics. While there, he was encouraged by a supporterøof the French Union to record the memories of his childhood. The resulting book, L'Enfant noir, was praised for its style and its uncritical attitude toward French colonization. A year later Laye published Le Regard du roi, a Kafkaesque story of a white man in Africa, which was very different in tone, style, and content from L'Enfant noir and from any other African literature being published at the time. L'Enfant noir and Le Regard du roi became seminal works of African fiction in French and were translated into English as The African Child and The Radiance of the King. Adele King met Camara Laye in 1978, two years before his death, and in 1980 published the principal study about him, The Writings of Camara Laye. In 1991 King set out to disprove rumors that Laye was not the author of one of his novels, Le Regard du roi. Instead she became convinced that the rumors were true and in the process unexpectedly discovered a far more interesting story about the creation of Laye as an author and public figure. Rereading Camara Laye describes King's research, which has taken more than ten years. Her inquiry involved finding those who knew Laye in Paris in the 1950s and interviewing them when possible as well as examining documents in libraries and archives in France and Belgium. King's findings provide important insights into French publishing and colonial politics in the years following World War II. She also shows how interpretations of Laye's novels have been shaped by the assumption that they were written by an African.

This "wonderful and enchanting" memoir tells the revelatory true story of one Muslim girl's life in her family's French Moroccan harem, set against the backdrop of World War II (The New York Times Book Review). "I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco..." So begins Fatima Mernissi in this illuminating narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth -- women who, without access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. A beautifully written account of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex, Dreams of Trespass illuminates what it was like to be a modern Muslim woman in a place steeped in tradition.

"Situating literature and anthropology in mutual interrogation, Miller's...book actually performs what so many of us only call for. Nowhere have all the crucial issues been brought together with the sort of critical sophistication it displays."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ". . . a superb cross-disciplinary analysis."—Y. Mudimbe