Alain Mabanckou’s 11th Novel Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize

Star-writer Alain Mabanckou’s eleventh novel, Black Moses, has been longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Mabanckou has been described by The Guardian UK as “Africa’s Samuel Beckett…one of the continent’s greatest living writers.” This nomination is the second for the Congolese novelist who was also shortlisted in 2015. At the time, the prize was awarded in celebration […]

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The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

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