The Story Of The Madman

Widely acclaimed when first published in French in 1994, Mongo Beti's tenth novel, L'histoire du fou, continues the author's humorous yet fierce criticism of the colonial system in Africa and its legacy of governmental corruption. Translated here as The Story of the Madman, the novel gives the English-speaking world Beti's comic satire of the fictional Chief Zoaételeu and his favorite sons Zoaétoa and Narcisse. In a modern fable that Beti uses to illustrate the problems of a people's disintegrating values in a postcolonial state, Chief Zoaételeu, a puppet under two dictatorial regimes, is swept into the frontline of politics, where his fortunes unravel. Along with his caustic portrayal of failed government--clearly a reflection of his native Cameroon--Beti's realism provides an intriguing view of the struggle for balance between traditional life and imminent change in African culture.

In this poignant companion to Elijah of Buxton, two boys united by tragedy find friendship and adventure in the Canadian woods. Benji and Red couldn’t be more different. They aren’t friends. They don’t even live in the same town. But their fates are entwined. A chance meeting leads the boys to discover that they have more in common than meets the eye. Both of them have encountered a strange presence in the forest, watching them, tracking them. Could the Madman of Piney Woods be real? In a tale brimming with intrigue and adventure, Christopher Paul Curtis returns to the vibrant world he brought to life in Elijah of Buxton. Here is another novel that will break your heart—and expand it, too. This critically acclaimed story by National Book Award finalist Christopher Paul Curtis joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes extra bonus content! Praise for The Madman of Piney Woods “Humor and tragedy are often intertwined, and readers will find themselves sobbing and chuckling, sometimes in the same scene.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “A delight, featuring the author’s obvious love for his characters, his skillful use of sentiment, and his often hyperbolic humor.” —Booklist, Starred Review “Heady stuff. Funny stuff. Smart stuff. Good stuff. Better get your hands on this stuff.” —School Library Journal “So suspenseful . . . Curtis deftly makes what might have been simply heart-rending hopeful and redeeming instead . . . A thrill ride of a plot.” —TheNew York Times

A philosophy student’s research draws him into the sexual underground of 1980s and early nineties New York John Marr is surprised he doesn’t have AIDS. He has been having near-daily sexual encounters with strange men since before the dawn of HIV, but he remains healthy. His initiation began in the bathroom of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, and since then he has found himself at home in the darkest corners of Manhattan’s culture of anonymous gay sex. During the day, it is a different story, as Marr works on his graduate thesis—an analysis of the work of a brilliant 1970s philosopher who died mysteriously in one of the gay bars of Hell’s Kitchen. As his research and his sex life begin to converge, Marr senses that if AIDS doesn’t get him, something darker will. The Mad Man, which the author dubbed a “pornotopic fantasy,” is more than a powerful work of philosophical erotica; it is a snapshot of a vanished moment in New York City’s gay history, when fear and lust commingled in a single powerful force.

"Tallis, a philosopher's servant, is sent to a Greek academy in Palestine only to discover that it has silently, ominously disappeared. No one will tell him what happened, but he learns what has become of four of its scholars. One was murdered. One committed suicide. One worships in the temple of Dionysus. And one...one is a madman. From the author of "The Brother's Keeper" comes a tale of mystery, horror, and hope in the midst of unimaginable darkness: the story behind the Gerasene demoniac of the Gospels."--Cover, page 4.

Award-winning author Mongo Beti presents The Poor Christ of Bomba, a cutting satirical critique on the role of Catholic missionaries and French colonialism in 1930s Cameroon. A revolutionary novel in its time. In the small village of Bomba, a French missionary priest is instructed to build a parish for its residents. Father Drumont has one important task; to save the village from heresy by preparing its girls for Christian marriage. A servant in Father Drumont's house, a young boy named Denis is reliant on the priest's generosity after the death of his mother. In the eyes of the Catholic church, Denis is the perfect example of the African heathen saved by Christianity – but the reality of what happens behind closed doors in much more sinister. 'One of the foremost African writers of the independence generation.' Guardian

Girls at War and Other Stories reveals the essence of life in Nigeria and traces twenty years in the literary career of one of the twentieth century's most acclaimed writers. In this collection of stories, which display an astonishing range of experience, Chinua Achebe takes us inside the heart and soul of a people whose pride and ideals must compete with the simple struggle to survive. Hailed by critics everywhere, Achebe's fiction re-creates with energy and authenticity the major issues of daily life in Africa.

Based on newly uncovered sources, The Madman and the Butcher is a powerful double biography of Sam Hughes and Arthur Currie and the story of one of the most shocking and highly publicized libel trials in Canadian history. Sir Arthur Currie achieved international fame as Canadian Corps commander during the Great War. He was recognized as a brilliant general, morally brave, and with a keen eye for solving the challenges of trench warfare. But wars were not won without lives lost. Who was to blame for Canada's 60,000 dead? Sir Sam Hughes, Canada's war minister during the first two and a half years of the conflict, was erratic, outspoken, and regarded by many as insane. Yet he was an expert on the war. He attacked Currie's reputation in the war's aftermath, accusing him of being a butcher, a callous murderer of his own men. Set against the backdrop of Canadians fighting in the Great War, this engaging narrative explores questions of Canada's role in the war, the need to place blame for the terrible blood loss, the nation's discomfort with heroes, and the very public war of reputations that raged on after the guns fell silent.

It’s been twenty years since Western State Hospital was closed down and the last of its inmates reintegrated into society. Francis Petrel was barely out of his teens when his family committed him to the asylum, after his erratic behavior culminated in a terrifying outburst. Now middle-aged, he leads an aimless, solitary life housed in a cheap apartment, periodically tended to by his sisters, and perpetually medicated to quiet the chorus of voices in his head. But a reunion on the grounds of the shuttered institution stirs something deep in Francis’s troubled mind: dark memories he thought he had laid to rest, about the grisly events that led to Western State Hospital’s demise. It begins in 1979, when twenty-one-year-old Petrel descends into the state-run purgatory of an overcrowded, understaffed Massachusetts mental hospital. Surrounded by inmates roaming the halls like drugged zombies and raving behind locked doors, well-meaning orderlies, jaded nurses, and patronizing doctors, Francis finds friendship with a motley assortment of fellow patients: a would-be Napoleon, a wise ex-firefighter, and a man obsessed with battling imagined devils. But there’s nothing imaginary about the young nurse found sexually assaulted and brutally murdered late one night after lights-out. The police suspect an inmate, while patients whisper about visions of a white-shrouded “angel.” But the striking and mysterious prosecuting attorney who arrives to investigate has her own chilling theory—about the grim, telltale “signature” left on the victim’s body, a string of unsolved sex killings, and a very real devil who, by chance or design, has come to turn a madhouse into a slaughterhouse. Now, with the past creeping back to haunt his thoughts, and nothing but a pencil and the bare walls of his bleak apartment, Francis surrenders to the overwhelming need to tell the story of those nightmarish days. But because the crime was never solved, it’s a story doomed to remain unfinished. Until, like Francis’s long-buried recollections, the killer resurfaces . . . with a vengeance. A tour de force narrative journey through the eerily unpredictable mind of an utterly unusual hero, The Madman’s Tale will keep even the most astute thriller reader uncertain, unnerved, and unable to resist the tantalizing twists and turns of this fiendishly suspenseful shadow show.