Tragic Sense of Life is a book of philosophical reflection which considers the nature and transience of humanity, the trials - physical, societal and emotional - of existence, together with death and the afterlife. A superb treatise whereby the author's intellect is unleashed upon a variety of questions, this text combines the passionate liveliness found in Unamuno's fictional efforts with a thought-provoking gravitas cast upon life and living. The towering ambitions of man are shown to pale in the face of limitations and reality: immortality, the greatest aspiration of all, is but an impossibility. The title, in alluding to tragedy, foretells the author's argument that life and human nature have a strong streak of absurdity. In the final chapter, the author compares the classic story of Don Quixote - the man whose mad ambition led him to ride his horse in four directions at once - with everyday human life.

VY Mudimbe: Undisciplined Africanism is the first English-language monograph dedicated to the work of Valentin Yves Mudimbe. This book charts the intellectual history of the seminal Congolese philosopher, epistemologist, and philologist from the late 1960s to the present day, exploring his major essays and novels. Pierre-Philippe Fraiture highlights Mudimbe's trajectory through major debates on African nationalism, Panafricanism, neo-colonialism, negritude, pedagogy, Christianisation, decolonisation, anthropology, postcolonial representations, and a variety of other subjects, using these as contexts for close readings of many of Mudimbe's texts, both influential and lesser-known. The book demonstrates that Mudimbe's intellectual career has been informed by a series of decisive dialogues with some of the key exponents of Africanism (Herodotus, EW Blyden, Placide Tempels), continental and postcolonial thought (Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Claude Levi-Strauss), and African thought and philosophy from Africa and the diaspora (L.S. Senghor, Patrice Nganang, and Achille Mbembe).