Camus' L'Etranger (The Outsider) has become one of the most widely read books of modern literature. The essays contained in this book celebrate its continuing influence throughout the world. Contributors come from Algeria, Samoa, India, Russia, France, Britain and the US. Also included are essays by prominent French and English-language authors for whom the novel has been an influential expression of contemporary sensibility. Other essays include feminist interpretations of Meursault, studies of Camus' narrative form, and explorations of the Algerian setting of the novel. Comparative studies show Camus' relation to the New Novel, to Greene and Orwell and to Jules Roy. Other books by Adele King include Camus, French Women Novelists: Defining a Female Style and Proust.

These essays on L'Etranger celebrate its continuing influence throughout the world. Contributors come from Algeria, Samoa, India, Russia, France, Britain and the United States. Included are essays by prominent French and English-language authors for whom the novel has been an influential expression of contemporary sensibility. Other essays include feminist interpretations of Meursault, studies of Camus's narrative form, and explorations of the Algerian setting of the novel. Comparative studies show Camus's relation to the New Novel, to Greene and Orwell, to Jules Roy, and to Sartre.

A study of a female style of writing. French, English and American theories of how women's creative imagination and use of language may differ from conventional literary norms are examined in relation to the work of five of the best 20th century French women writers.

Tierno Monenembo writes genocide into memory to devastating effect Tierno Monenembo was among the African authors invited to Rwanda after the 1994 Tutsi-Hutu massacre to write genocide into memory. In his novel The Oldest Orphan, that is precisely what Monenembo does, to devastating effect. Powerful testimony to an unspeakable historical reality, this story is told by an adolescent on death row in a prison in Kigall, the capital of Rwanda. Dispassionately, almost cynically, the teenager Faustin tells his tale, alternating between his days in jail, his adventures wandering the countryside after his parents and most of the people of his village have been massacred, and his escapades as a cheerful hoodlum in the streets of Kigali. Only slowly does the full horror of his parents' death and his own experience return to Faustin. His realization strikes the reader with shattering force, for it carries in its wake the impossible but inescapable questions presented by such a murderous episode of history and such a crippling experience for a child, a people, and a nation.

Out of French-speaking Africa, from Togo, Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Guinea, Congo, Rwanda, Djibouti, and Madagascar, comes the polyphony of new voices aired in this volume. The collection brings together fourteen important contemporary authors with roots in sub-Saharan French Africa and Madagascar, a new generation now living in France or the United States, and introduces their remarkable work to readers of English. These writers' stories, unlike earlier African literature, seldom resemble traditional folk tales. Instead they are concerned with the postindependence world and reveal in their rich and complex depths the influence of modern European and American short-story traditions as well as the enduring reach of African myths and legends.

This gathering of gifted writers tenders modern versions of myths; nostalgia for childhood in Africa; relations between the sexes in contemporary Africa; continuing political problems; and the life of the African diaspora in France--all related in new and familiar ways, in innovative and traditional forms. Their work, most of it little known outside France and their native African countries, revises our understanding of the lingering effects of colonization even as it celebrates the complexity, exuberance, and tenacity of African culture.

Camara Laye (1928-80) traveled to France from his native Guinea in 1947 on a scholarship to study automobile mechanics. While there, he was encouraged by a supporter of the French Union to record the memories of his childhood. The resulting book, L'Enfant noir, was praised for its style and its uncritical attitude toward French colonization. A year later Laye published Le Regard du roi, a Kafkaesque story of a white man in Africa, which was very different in tone, style, and content from L'Enfant noir and from any other African literature being published at the time. L'Enfant noir and Le Regard du roi became seminal works of African fiction in French and were translated into English as The African Child and The Radiance of the King.

Adele King met Camara Laye in 1978, two years before his death, and in 1980 published the principal study about him, "The Writings of Camara Laye." In 1991 King set out to disprove rumors that Laye was not the author of one of his novels, Le Regard du roi. Instead she became convinced that the rumors were true and in the process unexpectedly discovered a far more interesting story about the creation of Laye as an author and public figure. "Rereading Camara Laye" describes King's research, which has taken more than ten years. Her inquiry involved finding those who knew Laye in Paris in the 1950s and interviewing them when possible as well as examining documents in libraries and archives in France and Belgium.

King's findings provide important insights into French publishing and colonial politics in the years following World War II. She also shows how interpretations of Laye's novels have been shaped by the assumption that they were written by an African.