Through its unique kaleidoscopic lens, this book analyzes the work of Algeria’s first postcolonial woman writer to publish a novel in Arabic, Ahlam Mosteghanemi. Her novels Memory in the Flesh and Chaos of the Senses return to the trauma of the Algerian War of Independence to address the lingering anxieties of national belonging and memory in postcolonial Algeria at a time when the nation is caught between two forces: entrenched bureaucratic-political elites and populist Islamists, who imagine a return to a pre-modern, utopian past. This book argues that Mosteghanemi’s polyphonic narratives reveal that national narratives are always multiple—“unity” is not one, all-encompassing narrative, but instead an ever-evolving Bakhtinian dialogism accommodating multiple perspectives, memories, and stories. The study interprets Mosteghanemi’s metaphor of the bridge as a powerful device for exploring tensions between reality and imagination, exile and belonging, and traditional concepts of gender in ways that reimagine nationhood and gesture towards a new, collective future.

The final novel in the international bestselling trilogy from "literary phenomenon" ("Elle") Ahlem Mosteghanemi.

The powerful English debut of a rising young French star, Our Riches is a marvelous, surprising, hybrid novel about a beloved Algerian bookshop A Library Journal Best Book of the Year Finalist for the PEN Translation Prize Winner of the French American Foundation Prize Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto “by the young, for the young,” discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties (he was hopelessly generous) and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot (often compared to the legendary bookseller Sylvia Beach) carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers. Our Riches interweaves Charlot’s story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad (dispatched in 2017 to empty the old shop and repaint it). Ryad’s no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop’s self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man’s mind. Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it’s a hymn to the book and to the love of books.

In Packaging Post/Coloniality, Richard Watts breaks from convention and reads Francophone books by their covers, focusing on the package over the content. Watts looks at the ways that the 'paratext'--the covers, illustrations, promotional summaries, epigraphs, dedications, and prefaces or forewords that enclose the text--mediates creative works by writers from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia whose place in the French literary institution was and remains a source of conflict. In order to be acceptable for French bookstore shelves, the novels, essays, and collections of poetry created in colonial territories were deemed to need explanation and sponsorship by an authority in the field. Watts finds the French mission civilisatrice, or 'civilizing mission, ' manifest in prefaces, introductions, and dedications inserted in the books that appeared in the metropole during the height of French imperialism. In the postcolonial era, book packaging reveals a struggle to reverse the power dynamic: Francophone writers introduced each others' texts, yet books still appeared with covers promoting stereotypical images of the Francophone world. This fascinating journey through a particular cultural history of the book is a unique take on the quest for a literary identity. Watts concludes his study by looking at English mediations of Francophone works, with a chapter on reading and teaching Francophone literature in translation.

How does gender shape memory? What role does literature play in cultural remembering? These are two of the questions to which the present volume is addressed. Even if we agree that remembering is not biologically determined, we can assume that memory is influenced by the particular social, cultural and historical conditions in which individuals find themselves. And since men and women generally assume different social and cultural roles, their way of remembering should also differ. So, do women and men remember different events, narrate different stories, and narrate or read them in different ways? Gendered Memories, then, not only looks at memory gendered by literature, but also wants to know how gender shapes the memory of literature.

A compelling war novel, as seen by women, sheds light on the current Iraq conflict.

Ben Ouda, a senior ranking diplomat is found savagely murdered. Is this yet another victim of the never ending Islamic fundamentalist violence plaguing Algiers? Inspector Llob has doubts: Ben Ouda had too many fiends, too many far fetched theories...Against the background of a city in turmoil, Inspector Llob navigates the Algiers underworld and its rich elite. He resists the pressure of politicians, fundamentalists and crooks, in his pursuit of the truth