NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The plot provided by the universe was filled with starvation, war and rape. I would not—could not—live in that tale.” Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety—perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive. When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Though their bond remained unbreakable, Claire, who had for so long protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream: attending private school, taking up cheerleading, and, ultimately, graduating from Yale. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased. She felt at the same time six years old and one hundred years old. In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of “victim” and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms.

From the author of My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, a new graphic memoir brimming with black humor, which explores the ultimate irony: the author's addiction to 12-Step programs. “Say what you mean, but don’t say it mean.” —12-Step aphorism David Heatley had an unquestionably troubled and eccentric childhood: father a sexually repressed alcoholic, mother an overworked compulsive overeater. Then David's parents enter the world of 12-step programs and find a sense of support and community. It seems to help. David, meanwhile, grows up struggling with his own troublesome sexual urges and seeking some way to make sense of it all. Eventually he starts attending meetings too. Alcoholics Anonymous. Overeaters Anonymous. Debtors Anonymous. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. More and more meetings. Meetings for issues he doesn't have. With stark, sharply drawn art and unflinching honesty, David Heatley explores the strange and touching relationships he develops, and the truths about himself and his family he is forced to confront, while "working" an ever-increasing number of programs. The result is a complicated, unsettling, and hilarious journey—of far more than 12 steps.

This book looks at contemporary autobiographical works by writers with African backgrounds in relation to the idea of ‘place’. It examines eight authors’ works – Helen Cooper’s The House at Sugar Beach, Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country, Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage, Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland, Douglas Rogers’s The Last Resort, Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s Son of Elsewhere, Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil’s The Girl Who Smiled Beads and Aminatta Forna’s autobiographical writing – to argue that place is particularly central to personal narrative in texts whose authors have migrated multiple times. Spanning Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Rwanda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, this book interrogates the label ‘African’ writing which has been criticized for ignoring local contexts. It demonstrates how in their works these writers seek to reconnect with a bygone ‘Africa’, often after complex experiences of political upheavals and personal loss. The chapters also provide in-depth analyses of key concepts related to place and autobiography: place and privilege, place and trauma, and the relationship between place and nation.

Passages: On geo-analysis and the aesthetics of precarity is a multi-genre and transdisciplinary text addressing themes such as colonialism, nuclear zones of abandonment, migration control regimes, transnational domestic work, the biocolonial hostilities of the hospitality industry, legal precarities behind the international criminal justice regime, the shadow-worlds of the African soccerscape, and immunity regimes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This book invites inquiry into today’s apocalyptic narratives, humanitarian reason, and international criminal justice regimes, as well as the precarity generated by citizen time and 'consulate time'. The aesthetic breaks emerging from the book’s image-text montage draw attention to the ethics of encounter and passage that challenges colonial, domestic, and nation-statist sovereignty regimes of inattention.

This book looks at contemporary autobiographical works by writers with African backgrounds in relation to the idea of ‘place’. It examines eight authors’ works – Helen Cooper’s The House at Sugar Beach, Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country, Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage, Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland, Douglas Rogers’s The Last Resort, Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s Son of Elsewhere, Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil’s The Girl Who Smiled Beads and Aminatta Forna’s autobiographical writing – to argue that place is particularly central to personal narrative in texts whose authors have migrated multiple times. Spanning Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Rwanda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, this book interrogates the label ‘African’ writing which has been criticized for ignoring local contexts. It demonstrates how in their works these writers seek to reconnect with a bygone ‘Africa’, often after complex experiences of political upheavals and personal loss. The chapters also provide in-depth analyses of key concepts related to place and autobiography: place and privilege, place and trauma, and the relationship between place and nation.

More Nights Than Days is a unique exploration of the experience of children who survived the Holocaust—including Roma and Sinti victims—and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Children are among the principal victims of armed conflicts and slaughters; nonetheless, they perceive events through the prism of their unique perspective and have a range of coping techniques adults don't possess. This overview of writings of ninety-one child survivors bears evidence from a wide range of human ruthlessness. The author presents little-known texts along with famous memoirs and autobiographical fiction, with abundant quotations. Many of these are not only compelling as historical testimony, but poetic and stirringly expressive. Yudit Kiss has not written a historical study or literary criticism of the children’s books. She explores, instead, what the authors went through and what they felt and understood about their experience. An accessible and captivating reading, this volume presents a close-up, human size dimension of the destruction. The books written by child survivors also describe the resources and means that helped them to remain human even in the deepest well of inhumanity, offering precious lessons about resistance and resilience.M

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I was a precocious snoop. I lived in Kigali, Rwanda, and was a regular child. I was nicknamed Cassette. I repeated everything I saw or heard, including that my sister Claire, who was nine years older than me, wore shorts under her skirt and played soccer instead of doing family errands after school. #2 I wanted to be fed ice cream and pineapple cakes. I wanted to wear a teal-blue school uniform and grow into Claire’s clothes. I didn’t fit in. #3 I was very young when I lost my mother, and I remember being extremely upset by the funeral. I wanted to understand what was happening around me, and I spent a lot of time around old, sick people. I wanted to hear God talking to them. #4 I wanted to be like my mother, who was a storyteller. I wanted to tell stories and dance for others. I felt threatened as an older sibling, and begged my mother every day to return me my baby sister.