“Just as after you give birth you rapidly forget the pain involved, you easily overlook the effort that’s gone into composing a novel once it’s complete.”

“He provides no insight into what shamanism could—or should—mean to us, only a warning that we are bound, at some point, to be duped by it.”

“Every night the same nightmare interrupts my sleep.” With this sentence Scholastique Mukasonga begins her debut Cockroaches, a memoir that came out in French in 2006. That year, Mukasonga was fifty. She had been living in Normandy since 1992, when s…

“Could the flesh that bore the Messiah have required something as sinful as lust for its conception?”