Patrick Chamoiseau's Books

Antan D'enfance

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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Using the playful, orally inspired, and partially invented language for which he is renowned, Patrick Chamoiseau recalls the brilliant, magical universe of his early childhood in Martinique. At the center of this universe is his extraordinarily vigorous mother and her creative, pragmatic ways of coping with poverty and five children. As Chamoiseau presents these first impressions of an exceptional child growing up in a rich Creole culture, he also reflects in oblique but incisive ways on colonialism. He probes the boundary between reality and imagination, between the child?s awakening understanding and the adult?s memory of those earlier days.

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Page Count

132

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0803263821

ISBN 13

9780803263826

Slave Old Man

A Novel

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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Slave Old Man

A Novel

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

The "heart-stopping" (The Millions), "richly layered" (Brooklyn Rail), "haunting, beautiful" (BuzzFeed) story of an escaped captive and the killer hound that pursues him "Slave Old Man is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed—but every page pulses, blood-warm. . . . The prose is so electrifyingly synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to rub my eyes in disbelief." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Patrick Chamoiseau's Slave Old Man was published to accolades in hardcover in a brilliant translation by Linda Coverdale, winning the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and chosen as a Publishers WeeklyBest Book of 2018. Now in paperback, Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly enslaved person's daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his enslaver and a fearsome hound on his heels. We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man's flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing—even otherworldly—ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself. Chamoiseau's exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the Creole culture of early nineteenth-century Martinique, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.

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Page Count

100

Publisher

The New Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1620972964

ISBN 13

9781620972960

School Days

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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School Days

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

School Days (Chemin-d’Ecole) is a captivating narrative based on Patrick Chamoiseau’s childhood in Fort-de-France, Martinique. It is a revelatory account of the colonial world that shaped one of the liveliest and most creative voices in French and Caribbean literature today. Through the eyes of the boy Chamoiseau, we meet his severe, Francophile teacher, a man intent upon banishing all remnants of Creole from his students’ speech. This domineering man is succeeded by an equally autocratic teacher, an Africanist and proponent of “Negritude.” Along the way we are also introduced to Big Bellybutton, the class scapegoat, whose tales of Creole heroes and heroines, magic, zombies, and fantastic animals provide a fertile contrast to the imported French fairy tales told in school. In prose punctuated by Creolisms and ribald humor, Chamoiseau infuses the universal terrors, joys, and disappointments of a child’s early school days with the unique experiences of a Creole boy forced to confront the dominant culture in a colonial school. School Days mixes understanding with laughter, knowledge with entertainment—in ways that will fascinate and delight readers of all ages.

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168

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0803263767

ISBN 13

9780803263765

Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows traces the rise and fall of Pipi Soleil, ?king of the wheelbarrow? at the vegetable market of Fort-de-France, in a tale as lively and magical as the marketplace itself. In a Martinique where creatures from folklore walk the land and cultural traditions cling tenuously to life, Patrick Chamoiseau?s characters confront the crippling heritage of colonialism and the overwhelming advance of modernization with touching dignity, hilarious resourcefulness, and truly courageous joie de vivre.

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Page Count

248

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0803264267

ISBN 13

9780803264267

Crusoe’s Footprint

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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Crusoe’s Footprint

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

The discovery in Robinson Crusoe of the footprint of a fellow human on an abandoned island is a haunting and iconic moment in world literature. In the hands of Patrick Chamoiseau, one of the most innovative and lauded authors in the French language, this moment of shattered solitude becomes an occasion for Crusoe to reconsider his origins, existence, and humanity and for one of our most acclaimed novelists to craft a powerful meditation on race and history. Chamoiseau’s novel contrasts two intertwining narratives—the log entries of a slave ship’s captain and the story of a castaway who awakens on a beach and must rebuild his entire world alone. Chamoiseau creates a new perspective on the Crusoe myth, not only injecting the slave trade and Creole history into this previously ahistorical tale but conceiving an intensely original, freeform prose influenced by Creole cadence. This powerful work by a literary master is available in English for the first time in this eloquent and vivid translation.

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Page Count

227

Publisher

University of Virginia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813949076

ISBN 13

9780813949079

Solibo Magnificent

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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Solibo Magnificent

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

New York Times notable book of the year In Fort-de-France, Martinique, a colorful group of musicians, street vendors, and hopeless disciples, including the author, gather under a tamarind tree to listen to legendary bard Solibo Magnificent spin tales. Suddenly, in the middle of a raucously entertaining story, Solibo drops dead. So entranced and drunken are his friends, they initially fail to realize that their hero has spoken his last word. One hysterical listener runs to find the doctor and inadvertently returns with the overly eager, sinister chief sergeant, who holds Solibo's friends under suspicion for murder. At turns a madcap murder mystery, a political satire, and a lament on the death of a treasured tradition, Solibo Magnificent is wildly imaginative and exuberantly lyrical. Praise for Solibo Magnificent “Both a meaty tale and a cry on behalf of a drowning culture . . . by a poet and a novelist with a raffishly human and lyrical touch.”—Los Angeles Times “A world class author . . . whose voice and imagination are like nothing you've read before.”—The Washington Post Book World

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Page Count

210

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0679751769

ISBN 13

9780679751762

Slave Old Man

A Novel

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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Slave Old Man

A Novel

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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Page Count

100

Publisher

The New Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1620972964

ISBN 13

9781620972960

Creole Folktales (Large Print 16pt)

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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Creole Folktales (Large Print 16pt)

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

In this unusual collection of stories and fables, Goncourt prize-winner Patrick Chamoiseau re-creates in truly magical language the stories he heard as a child in Martinique....

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Page Count

114

Publisher

ReadHowYouWant.com

Published Date

ISBN 10

1459603141

ISBN 13

9781459603141

Migrant Brothers

A Poet's Declaration of Human Dignity

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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Migrant Brothers

A Poet's Declaration of Human Dignity

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

“If justice had a Jericho trumpet, Chamoiseau would be it.”—Junot Díaz As migrants embark on perilous journeys across oceans and deserts in pursuit of sanctuary and improved living conditions, what is the responsibility of those safely ensconced in the nations they seek to enter? Moved by repeated tragedies among immigrants attempting to enter eastern and southern Europe, Patrick Chamoiseau assails the hypocrisy and detachment that allow these events to happen. Migrant Brothers is an urgent declaration of our essential interconnectedness that asserts the necessity to understand one another as part of one human community, regardless of national origin.

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Page Count

141

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300240058

ISBN 13

9780300240054

School Days

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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School Days

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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Page Count

168

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0803263767

ISBN 13

9780803263765

Texaco

A Novel

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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Texaco

A Novel

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

Chamoiseau is a writer who has the sophistication of the modern novelist, and it is from that position (as an heir of Joyce and Kafka) that he holds out his hand to the oral prehistory of literature." --Milan Kundera Of black Martinican provenance, Patrick Chamoiseau gives us Texaco (winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize), an international literary achievement, tracing one hundred and fifty years of post-slavery Caribbean history: a novel that is as much about self-affirmation engendered by memory as it is about a quest for the adequacy of its own form. In a narrative composed of short sequences, each recounting episodes or developments of moment, and interspersed with extracts from fictive notebooks and from statements by an urban planner, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the saucy, aging daughter of a slave affranchised by his master, tells the story of the tormented foundation of her people's identity. The shantytown established by Marie-Sophie is menaced from without by hostile landowners and from within by the volatility of its own provisional state. Hers is a brilliant polyphonic rendering of individual stories informed by rhythmic orality and subversive humor that shape a collective experience. A joyous affirmation of literature that brings to mind Boccaccio, La Fontaine, Lewis Carroll, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Joyce, Texaco is a work of rare power and ambition, a masterpiece.

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Page Count

418

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0679751750

ISBN 13

9780679751755

Manifestos

By: Edouard Glissant,Patrick Chamoiseau

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Manifestos

By: Edouard Glissant,Patrick Chamoiseau

The collected manifestos of Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau: for a postcolonial response to planetary crisis. Manifestos brings together for the first time in English the manifestos written by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau between 2000 and 2009. Composed in part in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the texts resonate with the current context of divided identities and criticisms of multiculturalism. The individual texts grapple with concrete historical and political moments in France, the Caribbean, and North America. Across the manifestos, as well as two collectively signed op-eds, the authors engage with socio-political aspects of climate catastrophe, resource extraction, toxicity, and neocolonialism. Throughout the collection, Glissant and Chamoiseau engage with key themes articulated through their poetic vocabulary, including Relation, globalization, globality (mondialité), anti-universalism, métissage, the tout-monde (“whole-world”) and the tout-vivant (“all-living,” including the relationship of humans to each other and “nature”), créolité and the creolization of the world, and the liberation from community assignations in response to individualism and neoliberal societies. Translated as the first volume in the Planetarities series with Goldsmiths Press, the themes of Manifestos resonate with the planetary as they work in response to contemporary forms of (economic) globalization, western capitalism, identity politics, and urban, digital and cosmic ecosystems, as well as the role of the poet-writer. A distinguishing feature of this publication is its interventional aspect, which prioritizes engaged scholarship and practice while demonstrating the relevance of the poetic in response to the urgencies of planetary crisis.

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Page Count

108

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

191338053X

ISBN 13

9781913380533

French Guiana

Memory Traces of the Penal Colony

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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French Guiana

Memory Traces of the Penal Colony

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

Hailed by Milan Kundera as "an heir of Joyce and Kafka," Prix Goncourt winner Patrick Chamoiseau is among the leading Francophone writers today. With most of his novels having appeared in English, this book opens a new window on his oeuvre. A moving poetic essay that bears witness to the forgotten history of the French penal colony in French Guiana, French Guiana—Memory Traces of the Penal Colony accompanied by more than sixty evocative color photographs by Rodolphe Hammadi and translated, here for the first time, deftly by Matt Reeck.

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Page Count

129

Publisher

Wesleyan University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0819579319

ISBN 13

9780819579317

Free and French in the Caribbean

Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire, and Narratives of Loyal Opposition

By: John Patrick Walsh

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Free and French in the Caribbean

Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire, and Narratives of Loyal Opposition

By: John Patrick Walsh

“All the ingredients to become the next important book in the field of postcolonial studies with the emphasis on French Caribbean culture and literature.”—Daniel Desormeaux, University of Chicago In Free and French in the Caribbean, John Patrick Walsh studies the writings of Toussaint Louverture and Aimé Césaire to examine how they conceived of and narrated two defining events in the decolonializing of the French Caribbean: the revolution that freed the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1803 and the departmentalization of Martinique and other French colonies in 1946. Walsh emphasizes the connections between these events and the distinct legacies of emancipation in the narratives of revolution and nationhood passed on to successive generations. By reexamining Louverture and Césaire in light of their multilayered narratives, the book offers a deeper understanding of the historical and contemporary phenomenon of “free and French” in the Caribbean. “A fruitful intervention in a growing body of literature and increasingly lively debate on the Haitian Revolution and the figure of Toussaint Louverture, the book also contributes to the emerging scholarship on Césaire, Francophone literature, and postcolonial theory.”—Gary Wilder, CUNY Graduate Center “A valuable contribution to both the rapidly proliferating literature on the Haitian Revolution and the emerging revisionist appreciation of Césaire’s intellectual and political project.”—Small Axe “J.P. Walsh has produced for the nonspecialist reader an excellent analysis of the historiographical discourse on Toussaint Louverture and Aimé Césaire with a focus on the meaning(s) of decolonization in the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.”—New West Indian Guide “That Free and French inspires so many questions is testament to its ambition, the provocative parallel at its heart, and the richness of Walsh’s analysis.”—H-Empire

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Page Count

208

Publisher

Indiana University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0253008107

ISBN 13

9780253008107

Antan D'enfance

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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Antan D'enfance

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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132

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0803263821

ISBN 13

9780803263826

French Guiana

Memory Traces of the Penal Colony

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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French Guiana

Memory Traces of the Penal Colony

By: Patrick Chamoiseau

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129

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Wesleyan University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0819579319

ISBN 13

9780819579317

Migration and Refuge

An Eco-Archive of Haitian Literature, 1982-2017

By: John Patrick Walsh

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Migration and Refuge

An Eco-Archive of Haitian Literature, 1982-2017

By: John Patrick Walsh

This book argues that contemporary Haitian literature historicizes the political and environmental problems raised by the 2010 earthquake by building on texts of earlier generations. It contends that this literary “eco-archive” challenges universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene with depictions of migration and refuge within Haiti and around the Americas.

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Page Count

264

Publisher

Liverpool University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1786949563

ISBN 13

9781786949561

Little India

Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius

By: Patrick Eisenlohr

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Little India

Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius

By: Patrick Eisenlohr

Examining an example of linguistic plurality on the island of Mauritius, where more than two-thirds of the population is of Indian ancestry, this study focuses on the formation of diaspora as mediated through the cultural phenomenon of Indian ancestral languages - principally Hindi, which is used in religious contexts.

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