Black Bazaar

Praise for Alain Mabanckou

Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He received the Subsaharan African Literature Prize for Blue-White-Red, and the Prix Renaudot for Memoirs of a Porcupine, which is published by Serpent’s Tail along with his earlier novels, Broken Glass and African Psycho.

“This bar-room yarn-spinner tells his fellow tipplers’ tales in a voice that swings between broad farce and aching tragedy. His farewell performance from a perch in Credit Gone West abounds in scorching wit and flights of eloquence … vitriolic comedy and pugnacious irreverence” Boyd Tonkin, Independent

“A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humour and linguistic effervescence” Melissa McClements, Financial Times

“Broken Glass is a comic romp that releases Mabanckou’s sense of humour … Although its cultural and intertextual musings could fuel innumerable doctorates, the real meat of Broken Glass is its comic brio, and Mabanckou’s jokes work the whole spectrum of humour” Tibor Fischer, Guardian

“Deserves the acclaim heaped upon it … self-mocking and ironic, a thought-provoking glimpse into a stricken country” Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

“Taxi Driver for Africa’s blank generation … a deftly ironic Grand Guignol, a pulp fiction vision of Frantz Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’ that somehow manages to be both frightening and self-mocking at the same time” Time Out, New York

“The French have already called [Mabanckou] a young writer to watch. After this debut, I certainly concur” Globe and Mail, Toronto

“Broken Glass proves to be an obsessive, slyly playful raconteur … the prose runs wild to weave endless sentences, their rhythm and pace attuned to the narrator’s rhetorical extravagances … With his sourly comic recollections, Broken Glass makes a fine companion” Peter Carty, Independent

“A book of grubby erudition … full of tall tales that can entertain readers from Brazzaville to Bognor” James Smart, Guardian

“Mabanckou’s narrative gains an uplifting momentum of its own” Emma Hagestadt, Independent

“Mabanckou’s irreverent wit and madcap energy have made him a big name in France … surreal” Giles Foden, Condé Nast Traveller

“Magical realism meets black comedy in an excellent satire by an inventive and playful writer” Alastair Mabbott, Herald

“Africa’s Samuel Beckett … Mabanckou’s freewheeling prose marries classical French elegance with Paris slang and a Congolese beat. It weds the oral culture of his mother to an omnivorous bibliophilia encouraged by his stepfather … Memoirs of a Porcupine draws on oral lore and parables in its sly critique of those who use traditional beliefs as a pretext for violence” The Economist