Europe

Frantz Fanon's psychiatric career was crucial to his thinking as an anti-colonialist writer and activist. Much of his iconic work was shaped by his experiences working in hospitals in France, Algeria and Tunisia. The writing collected here was written from 1951 to 1960 in tandem with his political work and reveals much about how Fanon's thought developed, showing that, for him, psychiatry was part of a much wider socio-political struggle.

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.

Leïla Sebbar's novel recounts an event in French history that has been hidden for many years. Toward the end of the Algerian war, the FLN, an Algerian nationalist party, organized a demonstration in Paris to oppose a curfew imposed upon Algerians in France. About 30,000 Algerians gathered peacefully, but the protest was brutally suppressed by the Paris police. Between 50 and 200 Algerians were killed and their bodies were thrown into the Seine. This incident provides the background for a more intimate look into the history of violence between France and Algeria.

The internationally acclaimed writer Assia Djebar portrays the interlocking lives of women and men in an Algerian mountain town, plunged into a protracted anti-colonial struggle against France in the 1950s. Children of the New World, written one year before Algerian independence, reveals the escalating conflict from the perspectives of a variety of characters - traditional wives, radicalized students, and political organizers.

“This honest man, this good man, this man who never did wrong to anyone, who devoted his life to the public good, and who was one of the greatest writers in Algeria, has been murdered. . . .

En juin 2012, Samia Lakhdari, mon amie, ma sœur de combat, s’en est allée définitivement, comme elle a vécu: discrètement, sur la pointe des pieds. Je me suis rendue compte que j’enterrais dans les mêmes conditions une grande part, non seulement de moi-même, mais de nous-mêmes, génération née sous les ténèbres de l’occupation coloniale.

Since the first cases of a then-unidentified pneumonia were reported in late December, hoaxes, half-truths and flat-out lies have proliferated, mostly through social media.

People are increasingly aware of the role that water has in shaping society and how it impacts quality of life. This is the first book to provide a holistic perspective on water, capturing the full breadth of the science, technology, policy, history, and future outlook for the most important substance on earth — written at a level accessible to non-experts in each of these areas.