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Essential Encounters  by Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury. New York. 2002. Modern Language Association. 9780873527941. MLA Texts and Translations. Translated by Cheryl Toman. 94 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Published in 1969, Essential Encounters is the first novel by a woman of sub-Saharan francophone Africa. Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury, of Cameroon, wrote it "to inspire other women to write." Its story of love, infertility, a failed marriage, and adultery looks at both interpersonal connections and national politics from a feminist perspective. In the introduction the volume editor, Cheryl Toman, provides valuable background with a discussion of African matriarchy, past and present; ethnic groups in Cameroon; interracial relationships; and polygamy as it affects women's roles in the family and their interaction with one another. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born February 7, 1938, in Yaoundé, Cameroon; daughter of Jacques Kuoh-Moukouri (an administrator and author). Education: Attended Institut des Hautes Études d'Outre-Mer (Overseas Territories' Institute for Higher Studies), France; earned law degree.

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A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the Mexican Drug War by Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace. New York. 2016. OR Books. 9781944869120. 226 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - The term Mexican Drug War misleads. It implies that the ongoing bloodbath, which has now killed well over 100,000 people, is an internal Mexican affair. But this diverts attention from the U.S. role in creating and sustaining the carnage. It's not just that Americans buy drugs from, and sell weapons to, Mexico's murderous cartels. It's that ever since the U.S. prohibited the use and sale of drugs in the early 1900s, it has pressured Mexico into acting as its border enforcer--with increasingly deadly consequences. Mexico was not a helpless victim. Powerful forces within the country profited hugely from supplying Americans with what their government forbade them. But the policies that spawned the drug war have proved disastrous for both countries. Written by two award-winning authors, one American and the other Mexican, A Narco History reviews the interlocking twentieth-century histories that produced this twenty-first century calamity, and proposes how to end it.

Carmen Boullosa has published fifteen novels, most recently Tejas, La virgen y el violín, El complot de los románticos and Las paredes hablan. Her novels in English translation are Texas: The Great Theft; They're Cows, We're Pigs; Leaving Tabasco and Cleopatra Dismounts. She has received the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in Mexico, the Anna Seghers and Liberaturpreis in Germany, and the Café Gijón Prize in Madrid. She is a member of Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Creadores. Mike Wallace, Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center, and founder of the Gotham Center for New York City History, won the Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford University Press), co-written with Edwin Burrows. He is a co-founder of the Radical History Review and author of the essay collection Mickey Mouse History (1996).

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The Lazy Ones by Albert Cossery. New York. 1957. New Directions. Translated William Goyen. 158 pages.

DESCRIPTION - On the outskirts of an Egyptian city stands a strange house. Its occupants are never seen, except for a servant girl who goes to market for provisions. It is a house drugged with sleep, a house drowned in impenetrable slumber. Then one day an earnest young man comes out into the street, yawning and stretching. At first his eyes can barely endure the light or his ears the noise of human activity. But with resolute determination, he sets out toward his adventure. His name is Serag. This novel, by the young Egyptian author of THE HOUSE OF CERTAIN DEATH, is Serag's story - of the ties that held him in the house of sleep and of the destiny that broke them. For all of its realism - the very feel of the Arab world is in Cossery's pages - THE LAZY ONES is basically a comic novel, but in a vein of humor, extravagant and a little perverse, that is characteristically European.

Albert Cossery was born in Cairo in 1913, the son of middle-class parents. He studied law in Paris before the outbreak of the last war. During the war Cossery served in the Egyptian Merchant Navy. He now lives in Paris, devoting his time completely to literary work. THE LAZY ONES was his 2nd novel; a book of short stories about Egyptian life, Men God Forgot, was published in the United States by George Leite. His novel, THE HOUSE OF CERTAIN DEATH, appeared in the Directions Series in 1949.

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 Wizard Of The Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. New York. 2006. Pantheon Books. Translated from the Gikuyu by The Author. 771 pages. Jacket illustration & design by Peter Mendelsund. 037542248x. August 2006.

Ngugi's most important novel since PETALS OF BLOOD, WIZARD OF THE CROW is an extraordinary novel of twentieth-century Africa, that is by turns spiritual, funny, historical, fantastical, harrowing, and ultimately deeply human.

DESCRIPTION - From the exiled Kenyan novelist, playwright, poet, and literary critic-a magisterial comic novel that is certain to take its place as a landmark of postcolonial African literature. In exile now for more than twenty years, Ngugi wa Thiong'o has become one of the most widely read African writers of our time, the power and scope of his work garnering him international attention and praise. His aim in WIZARD OF THE CROW is, in his own words, nothing less than 'to sum up Africa of the twentieth century in the context of two thousand years of world history. ' Commencing in 'our times' and set in the 'Free Republic of Aburlria,' the novel dramatizes with corrosive humor and keenness of observation a battle for control of the souls of the Aburlrian people. Among the contenders: His High Mighty Excellency; the eponymous Wizard, an avatar of folklore and wisdom; the corrupt Christian Ministry; and the nefarious Global Bank. Fashioning the stories of the powerful and the ordinary into a dazzling mosaic, WIZARD OF THE CROW reveals humanity in all its endlessly surprising complexity. Informed by richly enigmatic traditional African storytelling, WIZARD OF THE CROW is a masterpiece, the crowning achievement in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's career thus far.

 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (born James Ngugi; 5 January 1938 – 28 May 2025) was a Kenyan author and academic, who has been described as East Africa's leading novelist and an important figure in modern African literature. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal, Mutiiri. In 1977, Ngugi embarked upon a novel form of theater in his native Kenya which sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be ‘the general bourgeois education system', by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances. Ngugi's project sought to ‘demystify' the theatrical process, and to avoid the ‘process of alienation [which] produces a gallery of active stars and an undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers' which, according to Ngugi, encourages passivity in ‘ordinary people'. Although Ngaahika Ndeenda was a commercial success, it was shut down by the authoritarian Kenyan regime six weeks after its opening. Ngugi was subsequently imprisoned for over a year. Adopted as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, the artist was released from prison, and fled Kenya. In the United States, he taught at Yale University for some years, and has since also taught at New York University, with a dual professorship in Comparative Literature and Performance Studies, and the University of California, Irvine. Ngugi has frequently been regarded as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His son is the author Mukoma wa Ngugi. Ngugi was born in Kamiriithu, near Limuru in Kiambu district, Kenya, of Kikuyu descent, and baptised James Ngugi. His family was caught up in the Mau Mau War; his half brother Mwangi was actively involved in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, and his mother was tortured at Kamriithu homeguard post. He received a B.A. in English from Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, in 1963; during his education, a play of his, THE BLACK HERMIT, was produced in Kampala in 1962. He published his first novel, WEEP NOT, CHILD, in 1964, which he wrote while attending the University of Leeds in England. It was the first novel in English to be published by an East African. His second novel, THE RIVER BETWEEN (1965), has as its background the Mau Mau rebellion, and described an unhappy romance between Christians and non-Christians. THE RIVER BETWEEN is currently on Kenya's national secondary school syllabus. His novel A Grain of Wheat (1967) marked his embrace of Fanonist Marxism. He subsequently renounced English, Christianity, and the name James Ngugi as colonialist; he changed his name back to Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and began to write in his native Gikuyu and Swahili. The uncensored political message of his 1977 play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I WILL MARRY WHEN I WANT) provoked then Vice President Daniel arap Moi to order his arrest. While detained in the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, he wrote the first modern novel in Gikuyu, Caitaani mutharaba-Ini (DEVIL ON THE CROSS), on prison-issued toilet paper. After his release, he was not reinstated to his job as professor at Nairobi University, and his family was harassed. Due to his writing about the injustices of the dictatorial government at the time, Ngugi and his family were forced to live in exile. Only after Arap Moi was voted out of office, 22 years later, was it safe for them to return. His later works include Detained, his prison diary (1981), DECOLONISING THE MIND: THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE IN AFRICAN LITERATURE (1986), an essay arguing for African writers' expression in their native languages, rather than European languages, in order to renounce lingering colonial ties and to build an authentic African literature, and MATIGARI (1987), one of his most famous works, a satire based on a Gikuyu folktale. In 1992 he became a professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University, where he held the Erich Maria Remarque Chair. He was a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as the Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. On August 8, 2004, Ngugi returned to Kenya as part of a month-long tour of East Africa. On August 11, robbers broke into his apartment: they assaulted both the Professor and his wife, and stole money and a computer. Since then, Ngugi returned to America, and in the summer 2006 the American publishing firm Random House published his first new novel in nearly two decades, WIZARD OF THE CROW, translated to English from Gikuyu by the author. On November 10, 2006, while in San Francisco at Hotel Vitale at the Embarcadero, Ngugi was harassed and ordered to leave the hotel by an employee. The event led to a public outcry and angered the Kenyan community in the San Francisco Bay area and abroad, prompting an apology by the hotel.

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The Life of the Party by Maureen Freely. New York. 1985. Simon & Schuster. 416 pages. Jacket design by Fred Marcellino. 0671506145.

A novel of American expatriate life in Istanbul that is by turns funny and tragic, from the translator of Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk.

DESCRIPTION - Hector Cabot was known to e the life of every party he attended in Istanbul: a famous rascal, an incorrigible womanizer, a good-for-nothing charmer, a loser of geese. That last attribute was commemorated each year on 'Hector Cabot Goosebuying Day' in honor of the famous binge in 1962 when he went downtown to buy a goose for Christmas dinner and returned three days later completely naked except for a Turkish flag. Hector taught at Woodrow College perched above the Bosphorus. Other members of the expatriate circle, though not quite as flamboyant as Hector, were avid spectators of, if not participants in, the decadence: Meredith Lacey, who stalked married men like wild game; her husband, Leslie, melancholy in his repressed homosexuality; Stella Ashe, lover of Hector and mother of his child; Stella's husband, Thomas, the quarry of Meredith Lacey. Those also featured in Maureen Freely's astonishing cast include Hector's demonic Greek mother, Aspasia, whose life is devoted to taunting her daughter-in-law, Amy, the long-suffering victim of Hector's philandering and hijinks; Emin Bey, the elegant and educated Turk who is friend and admirer of Hector; and his nephew Ismet, a secret policeman whose ambition leads him to invent dark secrets about the crowd of fast-living Westerners. Maureen Freely superbly portrays the expatriate party dwindling to its end against the backdrop of Turkeys own internal tensions. This is a marvelous, rich, funny book--full of life--peopled with engaging, sharply drawn characters, offering a sensitive portrait of the clash of cultures. Maureen Freely's vitality and precision as a writer, her ability to capture the niceties of social comedy and tragedy, make THE LIFE OF THE PARTY a novel of breathtaking assurance, wholly fulfilling the promise of her wickedly amusing first novel, MOTHER'S HELPER.

Maureen Freely was born in the US but grew up in Turkey, where her family still lives. She was educated at Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and has made her home in England for the past 22 years. She is the author of three works of non-fiction: PANDORA'S CLOCK (1993,) WHAT ABOUT US? (1995) AND THE PARENT TRAP (2000); AND SEVEN NOVELS: MOTHER'S HELPER (1979), THE LIFE OF THE PARTY (1985), THE STORK CLUB (1992), UNDER THE VULCANIA (1994), THE OTHER REBECCA (1996) and ENLIGHTENMENT (2007), which is set in Istanbul. She has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent and The Sunday Times for two decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing. For the past ten years she has been the Deputy Director of the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick. She is perhaps best known for her translations of SNOW (2003), ISTANBUL: MEMORIES OF A CITY (2004) and THE BLACK BOOK (2005), by the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, and for her campaigning journalism after Pamuk and an estimated 80 other writers were prosecuted (and in the case of Hrant Dink, assassinated) for insulting Turkishness, state institutions, or the memory of Ataturk.

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Civil Wars by June Jordan. Boston. 1981. Beacon Press. 0807032328. 188 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - In Civil Wars, June Jordan's battleground is the intersection of private and public reality, which she explores through a blending of personal reflection and political analysis. From journal entries on the line between poetry and politics and a discussion of language and power in 'White' versus 'Black' English to First Amendment issues, children's rights, Black studies, American violence, and sexuality, Jordan documents the very personal ways in which she meshes with the social issues of modern-day life in this country.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 - June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean American poet, novelist, journalist, biographer, dramatist, teacher, and committed activist. In her three decade career Jordan made her mark as one of the fiercest and most compassionate voices of her time. She became a passionate voice of a generation battling the constructions of race, gender, sexuality, politics, war, violence, and human rights. Jordan played an important role in the development of black artistic, social, and politic movements and is still widely regarded as one of the most significant and prolific Black, bisexual writers of the twentieth century.

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Canape Vert by Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin . New York. 1944. Farrar & Rinehart. . Translated from the French by Edward Larocque Tinker. 225 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - This book is the Haiti of the soil, the Haiti of Vodun rites, the Haiti of cockfights, of superstition, of primitive sex life, of poverty and toil, of savage dances and native rum, The reader moves in an unearthly atmosphere, he feels the haunted night, the dawn over Port-au-Prince, the rising and setting of the sun and the terrifying storms which break over the island. Vodun ceremonies, funeral rites, wild dancing under the stars to the beat of drums, are all dramatically described. Edward Larocque Tinker, leading authority on the Creole language who did the translation, says in his introduction: ‘In CANAPE-VERT we have, for the first time in English, a vivid and accurate picture of life on the island seen from the inside. The authors, both Haitian born, have captured the true subtlety of the Negro-peasant mentality, with all its strange, naive reasoning, its deep- rooted superstition, and the tang and savor of its humor.' CANAPE-VERT is an impressive and unforgettable book. It is the fiction winner of the Second Latin American Literary Prize Competition and was selected for the award by Blair Niles, Ernesto Montenegro and John Dos Passos.

Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904–1975), was a Haitian poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist and politician. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin was born December 11, 1904 in Port-au-Prince. He and his younger brother, Pierre Marcelin (1908-?), worked together on the writing of several novels about rural Haiti, highlighting the themes of peasant life and Haitian folklore. Philippe went to high school in Port-au-Prince and finished his education in Paris where he studied law. While there, he became acquainted with Valéry Larbaud, who arranged to have some of his poems published in La revue européenne, a monthly literary journal that was published from 1923 to 1931. Back in Haiti, he began his career as general secretary at the Ministry of Public Works. Like most Haitian intellectuals, he was opposed to the American occupation of Haiti, which had been established in 1915. In 1927, together with Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Émile Roumer and Normil Sylvain (1900-1929), he helped create La Revue Indigène, a literary journal in which they published their poems. They idea was to honor the indigenous Haitian literary and artistic material, and return the culture to its pre-occupational state. His first novel Canapé-Vert, was published in 1944. In 1946, he participated in the founding of the short-lived Popular Socialist Party (PSP), together with Anthony Lespès (fr). That same year he published his second novel, La Bête de Musseau, translated as The Beast of the Haitian Hills. In 1948, when the PSP was declared illegal by President Dumarsais Estimé, he moved to the United States, where he worked as a translator for the Pan-American Union. His third novel, Le Crayon de Dieu, appeared in 1952. His last novel, Tous les Hommes sont Fous was published in 1972 and translated into English by his wife, Eva. He died at his home in Cazenovia, near Syracuse, New York, in 1975.

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Kallocain by Karin Boye. Madison. 1966. University of Wisconsin Press. Translated from the Swedish by Gustaf Lannestock. Introduction by Richard B. Vowles. 193 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - Fictional scientist's memoir of a distopian totalitarian state, of which he is a cog, having developed a drug used to destroy privacy of thought - a 'truth serum'. The author, born in 1900, took her own life in 1941. First published in Swedish in 1940, after the author visited Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany; much later nominated for a Retro-Hugo award, filmed as a television miniseries in 1981, often compared to 1984 and Brave New World. 

In a different translation from Penguin Classics:

Kallocain by Karin Boye. New York. 2019. Penguin Books. 9780241608302. Translated from the Swedish and with an introduction by David McDuff. 170 pages. paperback. Cover: Alterpiece, Group X, Number 1, 1915, Hilma of Klint.

DESCRIPTION - The classic World War II–era dystopian novel, written at the midpoint between Brave New World and 1984, in its first new translation in more than fifty years. Leo Kall is a zealous middle-ranking scientist in the totalitarian World State who has just made a thrilling discovery: a new drug, Kallocain, that will force anyone who takes it to tell the truth. At last, criminality will be dragged out into the open and private thought can finally be outlawed. But can the World State be trusted with Kallocain? For that matter, can Kall himself be trusted? Written as the terrible events of World War II were unfolding, Karin Boye’s classic dystopian novel speaks more clearly than ever of the dangers of acquiescence and the power of resistance.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karin Maria Boye (October 26, 1900 - April 24, 1941) was a Swedish poet and novelist. Boye was born in Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden and moved with her family to Stockholm in 1909. She studied at Uppsala University from 1921 to 1926 and debuted in 1922 with a collection of poems, ‘Clouds' (Swedish: Moln). During her time in Uppsala and until 1930, Boye was a member of the Swedish ClartE League, a socialist group in those days very anti-Fascist. In 1931 Boye, together with Erik Mesterton and Josef Riwkin, founded the poetry magazine Spektrum, introducing T. S. Eliot and the Surrealists to Swedish readers. She translated many of Eliot's works into Swedish; she and Mesterton translated ‘The Waste Land‘. Boye is perhaps most famous for her poems, of which the most well-known ought to be ‘Yes, of course it hurts' (Swedish: Ja visst gör det ont) and ‘In motion' (I rörelse) from her collections of poems ‘The Hearths' (Härdarna), 1927, and ‘For the sake of the tree' (För trädets skull), 1935. She was also a member of the Swedish literary institution Samfundet De Nio (chair number 6) from 1931 until her death in 1941. Boye's novel ‘Crisis' (Kris) depicts her religious crisis and lesbianism. In her novels ‘Merit awakens' (Merit vaknar) and ‘Too little' (För lite) she explores male and female role-playing. Outside Sweden, her best-known work is probably the novel Kallocain. Inspired by her visit to the Soviet Union in 1928 and her visit to Germany during the rise of Nazism, it was a portrayal of a dystopian society in the vein of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (though written almost a decade before Orwell's magnum opus). In the novel, an idealistic scientist named Leo Kall invents Kallocain, a kind of truth serum. Between 1929 and 1932 Boye was married to another ClartE member, Leif Björck. The marriage was apparently a friendship union. In 1932, after separating from her husband, she had a lesbian relationship with Gunnel Bergström, who left her husband, poet Gunnar Ekelöf, for Boye. During a stay in Berlin 1932-1933 she met Margot Hanel, whom she lived with for the rest of her life, and referred to as ‘her wife'. Boye died in an apparent suicide when swallowing sleeping pills after leaving home on 23 April 1941. She was found, according to the police report at the Regional Archives in Gothenburg, on April 27, curled up at a boulder on a hill with a view just north of Alingsås, near Bolltorpsvägen, by a farmer who was going for a walk. The boulder is now a memorial stone. Margot Hanel committed suicide shortly thereafter. Karin Boye was given two very different epitaphs. The best-known is the poem ‘Dead Amazon' (Död amazon) by Hjalmar Gullberg, in which she is depicted as ‘Very dark and with large eyes'. Another poem was written by her close friend Ebbe Linde and is entitled ‘Dead friend' (Död kamrat). Here, she is depicted not as a heroic Amazon but as an ordinary human, small and grey in death, released from battles and pain. A literary association dedicated to her work was created in 1983, keeping her work alive by spreading it among new readers. In 2004, one of the branches of the Uppsala University Library was named in her honour.

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Conversations with Professor Y by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Hanover. 1986. Brandeis University Press/University Press Of New England. 0874513634. Translated from the French by Stanford Luce. 190 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - "Here's the truth, simply stated . . . bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales." So begins the imaginary interview that comprises this novel. Professor Y, the interviewing academic, asks questions that allow CEline, a character in his own book, the chance to rail against convention and defend his idiosyncratic methods. In the course of their outrageous interplay, CEline comes closer to defining and justifying his poetics than in any of his other novels. But this is more than just an interview. As the book moves forward, Professor Y reveals his real identity and the characters travel through the streets of Paris toward a bizarre climax that parodies the author, the critic, and, most of all, the establishment.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, and his novels have had an enduring influence on later authors. However, he remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.

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Peace on Earth by Stanislaw Lem. New York. 1994. Harcourt Brace. 0151715548. Translated from the Polish by Elinor Ford & Michael Kandel. 240 pages. hardcover. Jacket photo courtesy of NASA.

DESCRIPTION - Lem's hilarious send-up of militarism, espionage, scientists, and psychiatrists goes to unprecedented extremes as Ijon Tichy, unflappable as always, fights for truth and justice in a world gone mad. While relieving himself behind a boulder in the Sea of Serenity - there are no urinals on the moon - Ijon Tichy was callotomized by remote ultrasound, probably from one of those superweapons invented by the invisible war robots. His corpus callosum, that is, was severed, the two hemispheres of his brain separated, which is why now, writing this on the typewriter, he can type only with his right hand. The left has to be tied down; it won't listen to reason; it keeps pulling the page out of the typewriter. But what, you ask, was Tichy doing on the moon in the first place, and in the vicinity of self-evolving, autonomous, intelligent weapons? He was sent on a mission by the Lunar Agency to save the world. He saved the world - but saved it too well, alas. For what he did it wasn't his fault he might receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and then again he might be shot for treason.

Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.

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