Description: "Originally published in France as Le Commerce des Allongâes by Editions du Seuil, in 2022"--Title page verso.
Brief description:
Alain Mabanckou was born in Congo in 1966. An awardwinning novelist, poet, and essayist, Mabanckou currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He is the author of African Psycho, Broken Glass, Black Bazaar, and Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty, as well as The Lights of PointeNoire, Black Moses, and The Death of Comrade President (The New Press). In 2015, Mabanckou was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.
Review Quotes: Praise for Dealing with the Dead:
"Surrealistic and unnerving. . . . [A] wonder-filled, phantasmagorical novel."--Foreword Reviews (starred review)
"A lively dance between the permeable worlds of the living and the recently dead, and the present and the inescapable past."
--NPR Books "A sharp and entertaining addition to Alain Mabanckou's broader portrayal of Pointe-Noire's historical complexities."
--Times Literary Supplement
"Funny, spooky and surreal, this shapeshifting novel is at once serious and comic, spooky and cheerful, grave and bitter, erudite, gossipy, moralising, and excoriating."
--The Guardian
"We should all be reading Alain Mabanckou right now. His brilliantly imaginative novels throw a rope across borders and between people. A glorious, funny, surreal novel, set in communist Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s."
--Alex Preston, Financial Times
"Mabanckou interweaves horror and gallows humour to great effect, the shifts in tone are beautifully controlled, and his prose is rendered into exquisite English by Stevenson."
--The Observer
"Mabanckou's satire is as biting as writers from Armando Iannucci to Paul Beatty. Dealing with the Dead is a rewarding, humorously dark read."
--Buzz magazine
"Mabanckou presents us with a sexy, pulsating city while mining deadpan comedy from its superstitions and its corrupt clerical and political elite."
--Telegraph
"This is writing that literally and figuratively reshapes you, revealing spatial and emotional dimensions that are both all too foreign and all too familiar. Mabanckou infuses his novel with the macabre to move, unnerve, and unexpectedly delight."
--The Skinny (5-star review)
"Exuberant . . . Dealing with the Dead is often damning, frequently hilarious and always compassionate. At just 200 pages, Helen Stevenson's translation from the French performs supple shifts between registers and keeps the story moving at lightning pace. It's the work of a writer who, in exile, has poured his indignation and longing for home into a novel that transports his readers there and immerses us in its complexities."
--Financial Times Profound, poignant, and gripping."
--World Literature Today
"Mabanckou sketches the eccentric cast of local characters, living and dead, with satirical wit and loving detail."
--Daily Mirror "An impactful read."
--Library Journal "An exhilarating tale examining the intersection of our world and the next."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Dealing With the Dead achieves something no outsider, however gifted or knowledgeable, could pull off: showing how magic, superstition, religious faith and credulity (as in, a hunger to believe) play into the everyday lives of most Pointe-Noireans. . . . Mabanckou can set a plot as well as the next novelist, but it's in the stories, the layering of his people's wildly divergent experiences whether in this world or the next, that his wit, tenderness and sometime flares of righteous outrage shine the brightest."
--The Arts Fuse