torture

The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on C.I.A. interrogation tactics added a new chapter to the national conversation on the government's use of torture.

Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People is a riveting book that exposes the potential in each of us for acting unspeakably. John Conroy sits down with torturers from several nations and comes to understand their motivations. His compelling narrative has the tension of a novel. He takes us into a Chicago police station, two villages in the West Bank, and a secret British interrogation center in Northern Ireland, and in the process we are exposed to the experience of the victim, the rationalizations of the torturer, and the seeming indifference of the bystander.

A young revolutionary plants a bomb in a factory on the outskirts of Algiers during the Algerian War. The bomb is timed to explode after work hours, so no one will be hurt. But the authorities have been watching. He is caught, the bomb is defused, and he is tortured, tried in a day, condemned to death, and thrown into a cell to await the guillotine. A routine event, perhaps, in a brutal conflict that ended the lives of more than a million Muslim Algerians. 

"Where is your wound?" asks Jean Genet in the lines Laurent Mauvignier uses as an epigraph to The Wound. By the time we have finished this four-part novel, we realize that for many the wound lies four decades back in "the Events" that people have tried to not talk about ever since: the Algerian War.

This new translation brings together two of Algerian author Maïssa Bey's important works for the first time in English. Do You Hear in the Mountains... is a compelling piece of autofiction in which three destinies meet dramatically on a train moving through France. We meet an Algerian refugee, whom we recognize as Bey herself. She has escaped the civil war and cannot forget her father's commitment to independence nor his death under the torture of the French soldiers.

In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known. As Isaac navigates the terrors of prison, and his wife feverishly searches for him, his children struggle with the realization that their family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger.

Kim Yong shares his harrowing account of life in a labor camp--a singularly despairing form of torture carried out by the secret state. Although it is known that gulags exist in North Korea, little information is available about their organization and conduct, for prisoners rarely escape both incarceration and the country alive. Long Road Home shares the remarkable story of one such survivor, a former military official who spent six years in a gulag and experienced firsthand the brutality of an unconscionable regime.

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it.

For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire whose servant he is. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he finds himself jolted into sympathy with their victims--until their barbarous treatment of prisoners of war finally pushes him into a quixotic act of rebellion, and thus into imprisonment as an enemy of the state.

Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number is a non-fiction memoir published in 1981 by the Soviet-born Argentine author Jacobo Timerman. At two in the morning of April 15, 1977, twenty armed men in civilian clothes arrested Jacobo Timerman, editor and publisher of leading Buenos Aires newspaper, La Opinión. Thus began thirty months of imprisonment, interrogation, and torture. Unlike 15,000 other Argentines, 'the disappeared,' Timerman was eventually released into exile.