Broken Glass [Paperback]

A man sits in a bar, ruminating on his own failures and conversing with an ensemble of memorable characters that pass in and out of the same space. Its archetypal stuff, but Mabanckou transforms it into a work that intimately inhabits its narrators mind even as it makes a host of bold literary allusions, from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Eug?ne Ionesco. A new introduction to this edition by Uzodinma Iweala offers varied and nuanced insights into the novels themes as well as the initial reception it received when it first appeared in translation. Words Without Borders

In Republic of the Congo, in the town of Trois-Cents, in a bar called Credit Gone West, a former schoolteacher known as Broken Glass drinks red wine and records the stories of the bar and its regulars, including Stubborn Snail, the owner, who must battle church people, ex-alcoholics, tribal leaders, and thugs set on destroying him and his business; the Printer, who had his respectable life in France ruined by a white woman, his wife; Robinette, who could outdrink and outpiss any man until a skinny-legged stranger challenged her reign; and Broken Glass himself, whose own tale involves as much heartbreak, squalor, disappointment, and delusion. A brand-new edition of an irreverent, allusive, scatalogical, tragicomic masterpiece from one of our greatest living Francophone writers.Praise forBroken Glass

The Guardian, 1 of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Whatever else might be in short supply in the Congo depicted by Alain Mabanckou, imagination and wit arent . . .Broken Glassis a whistlestop tour of French literature and civilization, and if you dont know your Marivaux, your Chateaubriand, your ENAs and Weston shoes youll miss a lot of the gags (a quarrel of Brest, anyone?)but dont worry, there are still plenty left. Its not just French writers who make an appearance. That arch navel-gazer Holden Caulfield . . . has a walk-on part, l£#