World Literature: Alain Mabanckou’s “Dealing with the Dead”

Photo Credit: Caroline Blache

Our final World Literature reading of 2025 welcomes author Alain Mabanckou, who shares his moving, exuberant novel, Dealing With the Dead. Praised by The Guardian for its blend of “magic realism, crime, mythology and satire,” the work is a ghostly reckoning with Congolese history from one of Africa’s greatest living writers. 

“Ever since I read Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou’s novel African Psycho, published here in 2007, I’ve been hooked. His books—Memoirs of a Porcupine, Broken Glass, The Death of Comrade President, among others—are twisted, scathing, omnivorous, and have earned him a cult-like following. His latest, Dealing with the Dead, again revels in his morbid but irrepressible spirit to explore vital questions of politics and history, life and death.”—Anderson Tepper

One day in the Congolese town of Pointe-Noire, Liwa Ekimakingaï wakes to find himself in a cemetery where, three days earlier, he had been buried. Bewildered by his predicament and unwilling to relinquish his tender bond with his devoted grandmother, Liwa makes his way back home to see her one last time, against all spectral advice. As he does, disturbing rumors swirl together with Liwa’s jumbled memories of his last night on earth, leading him to try and solve the mystery of his own untimely demise.

Sure to appeal to readers of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Dealing with the Dead is a phantasmagorical tale of ambition, community, and forces beyond human control, and a scathing satire on corruption and political violence by one of the most recognized chroniclers of modern Central Africa.

You can purchase a copy of Alain’s book, Dealing with the Dead, at City of Asylum Bookstore.

About the Author:

Alain Mabanckou was born in Congo in 1966. An award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, Mabanckou currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He is the author of African Psycho, Broken Glass, Black Bazaar, and Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, as well as The Lights of Pointe-Noire, Black Moses, and The Death of Comrade President (The New Press). Alain has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize twice: once in 2015, when the prize was for a body of work, and once in 2017 for Black Moses.

About the Moderator:

Anderson Tepper is City of Asylum’s Curator of World Literature. He has been a guest curator of PEN America’s World Voices Festival and is a longstanding member of the international committee of the Brooklyn Book Festival. He writes on books and authors for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and World Literature Today. Anderson also serves on the City of Asylum Advisory Board.

About Your Visit: 

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