Frankétienne

"A translation from the Haitian Kreyol of the first major novel in Haiti's national vernacular. Written in an unconventional style with a number of voices and a combination of myth, poetry, allegory, magical realism, and social realism, Franketienne's Dezafi tells the tale of a plantation that is run and worked by zombies for the financial benefit of the living owner. With the walking dead and bloody cockfights ('dezafi') as cultural metaphors for Haitian existence, Dezafi is ultimately an allegory of political and social liberation"--

"Ready to Burst follows the lives of two young men and their individual attempts to make sense of the deeply troubled society surrounding them. An informed critique of the "brain drain" prompted by the Duvalier dictatorship, Ready to Burst is, in Frankétienne's words, a portrait of "the extreme bitterness of doom in the face of the blind machinery of power." Widely recognized as Haiti's most important literary figure and an outspoken challenger of political oppression, Frankétienne was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. The New York Times has called Frankétienne "the Father of Haitian Letters."--