Ready to Burst

“A Haitian novel about friendship, politics and artistic theory…. Frankétienne writes with a savage beauty about politics, art, and the roles of men and women in a turbulent world.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Ready to Burst is a gorgeous, explosive book filled to the brim with genius and fantasy, with surreal dreams and memories. Open it anywhere and it will astonish you.” — Amy Wilentz, Chicago Tribune

“The relationship between Raynand and his friend Paulin, a novelist obsessed with Spiralist ideology, is central. Paulin is writing a novel himself and it bears remarkable similarities to Ready To Burst. In other hands, this meta-staging of a drama amid a literary manifesto might risk a descent into pomposity and obfuscation, but Frankétienne has a deftness of touch pleasingly reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño. In Glover’s fine translation we can only hope that the “Father of Haitian Letters” will finally reach the wider audience he deserves.” — The Times Literary Supplement

• “His work can speak to the most intellectual person in the society as well as the most humble. It’s a very generous kind of genius he has, one I can’t imagine Haitian literature ever existing without.” – Edwidge Danticat

“A whirlwind of a book by the master of Haitian letters” — The Daily Beast

”[Frankétienne] has long been considered one of the most invigorating Caribbean authors … Ready to Burst marks the first, long overdue, appearance in the United States of the energetic founder of literary ‘spiralism’ … [Ready to Bust] consists of three at once intersecting and merging lives, and their single, compelling, intricately structured story is told in resourceful, oft-poetic language.” – The Arts Fuse

“Ready to Burst is a vital, impressive work.” – Michael A. Orthofer, complete-review

• “The “burst” in “Ready to Burst”, also announces the eruption onto the scene of one of literature’s great figures […] a magician of technique and feeling, in the tradition of a great family of writers like James Joyce, João Guimarães Rosa et Osman Lins.” Rafael Lucas in his preface to the 2004 French edition of “Ready to Burst”

• “Each of Frankétienne’s words builds a world of which every Haitian dreams.” Emmelie Prophete, Haitian-American writer (Interview w/Huffington Post)

• “Frankétienne speaks like an educated man […] but also like a friend and a citizen of the world at peace with himself and with others.” Annick Chalifour, l’Express.

• “It is Frankétienne’s audacity in his writing - his charming ability to calmly bring his interlocutor into his initially terrifying world […] which makes him such an incredible writer and persona”. Alessandra Benedicty, Professor at the City College of New York (Interview w/ Huffington Post)

. Author Bio- Born in 1936 in Ravine-S che, Haiti, Franketienne is a prolific novelist, painter, playwright, musician and poet. Widely recognized as Haiti’s most important literary figure and an outspoken challenger of political oppression, Franketienne was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. The New York Times has called Franketienne “the Father of Haitian Letters.” He has a unique style, often blending French and Haitian Creole and inventing new words.. Translator- Kaiama L. Glover received a B.A. in French History and Literature and Afro-American Studies from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University. She is now an associate professor of French at Barnard College. Professor Glover’s book, Haiti Unbound- A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP 2010), addresses the general issue of canon formation in the francophone Caribbean and the particular fate of the Haitian Spiralist authors vis- -vis this canon.

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