Dany Laferrière

On the sun-drenched island of Haiti in the 1970s, under the shadow of “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s notorious regime, locals eke out an existence as servants, bartenders and panderers to the white elite. Fanfan, Charlie, and Legba, aware of the draw of their adolescent, black bodies, seduce rich, middle-aged white tourists looking for respite from their colourless jobs and marriages.

These “relationships” mirror the power...

Résumé Un après-midi d'été, l'écrivain croise sur la rue Saint-Denis un jeune homme, Mongo, qui vient de débarquer à Montréal. Il lui rappelle cet autre jeune homme arrivé dans la même ville en 1976. Le même désarroi et la même détermination. Mongo demande: comment faire pour s'insérer dans cette nouvelle société ? Ils entrent dans un café et la conversation débute comme dans un roman de Diderot. C'est ce ton léger et grave que...

Brilliant and tense, Dany Laferrière's first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, is as fresh and relevant today as when it was first published in Canada in 1985. With ribald humor and a working-class intellectualism on par with Charles Bukowski's or Henry Miller's, Laferrière's narrator wanders the streets and slums of Montreal, has sex with white women, and writes a book to save his life.
With

...

At the age of twenty-three, the narrator hurriedly packed his bags and left behind the stifling heat of Port-au-Prince for the unending winter of Montreal. It was 1976, and Baby Doc Duvalier's regime had just killed a journalist colleague. But thirty-three years later, after his father's death, he decides to return him to Baradères, the village where he was born.
How does one return from exile? In Dany's case, he grounds himself in a hotel

...

On the sun-drenched island of Haiti in the 1970s, under the shadow of "Baby Doc" Duvalier's notorious regime, locals eke out an existence as servants, bartenders and panderers to the white elite. Fanfan, Charlie, and Legba, aware of the draw of their adolescent, black bodies, seduce rich, middle-aged white tourists looking for respite from their colourless jobs and marriages. These "relationships" mirror the power struggle inherent in all transactions...

On January 12, 2010, novelist Dany Laferrière had just ordered dinner at a Port-au-Prince restaurant with a friend when the earthquake struck. He survived; some three hundred thousand others did not. The quake caused widespread destruction and left over one million homeless. This moving and revelatory book is an eyewitness account of the quake and its aftermath. In a series of vignettes, Laferrière reveals the shock, rage, and grief experienced...