Machaho Tellem Chaho

In the Algerian-authors-who-write-detective-novels league, Yasmina Khadra has to be top man. It pains me to say this I must confess, not because interviews have put the spotlight only on his egocentric traits making him a rather indigestible character, but because of the sheer Russian- roulette-style of his work.  I’ve often wondered, how can a man write so outstandingly well (see his work’s crown-jewel L'Olympe des infortunes, 2010), and in parallel write so shockingly badly (see the abysmal L’Attentat translated in EN by John Cullen as The Attack ). These manic up-and-down literary turns leave me baffled, but admittedly, keep me interested.   This aside, he never fails in the detective fiction genre. His very enjoyable and well-netted Inspector Llob series can't be put down. The central theme of Khadra’s detective stories is corruption within the police force and politics, and he explores how these corrupted worlds both merge, clash, and merge again, ...

A trois degré vers l’est (Three degrees East) is Chawki Amari's second short-story collection, and was published in 2008 by Chihab editions .

Chawki Amari published his novel Nationale 1 ( Highway 1 ) in 2007. In it, he recounts the story of Kalim and his car Taos, both leaving Algiers to go and see Boudjemaa. He heads to In Guezzam, Algeria's furthest point South knowing that "Boudjem3a is not waiting in In Guezzam". Nationale 1 is also the story of Algeria, and the magic of its topography. Algeria is around 2,4 million km2. It is the 11 th biggest country in the world. North-South, it begins from a coastal area with its toes in the Mediterranean, continues South, past the Tropic of Cancer, further than NATO's geographic limits for member countries, and finishes at In Guezzam, because, once upon a time, not so long ago, the coloniser's ball pen marked a spot on a map, to keep to himself underground water resources, otherwise rare in the area. Algeria's topographic variety is bewildering. Its upper area is contoured by the sea, its lower body by the third largest desert on earth...

It's the end of the day, and a taxieur last fare forgets her bag in the car. N ext morning, he goes back to the address to return the bag to the woman. For this, he doesn’t expect to spend seven months in jail. It was not Mourad's unsuspicious nature that sent him to El Harrach’s 7 Hectares jail, it was the unpretentious belief he’d been struck by love at first sight by Farida as he drove her to her parents’ home. Farida, though, had been murdered 18 months previously, and had long been buried.  While investigating a crime that wasn’t one, and a murder that never took place, Mourad discovers that Farida is in fact Ghislaine, a twin born in Algeria and stolen away by a gang trafficking babies just before Algeria’s independence. In Intrigue at Sidi Fredj , Khaled Mandi tells a tale in an Enid-Blyton-style that plays with djinns, ghosts, folklore, the reality of jail life, inmates’ solidarity and a crushing Algerian justice system. Should Mandi have closed the st...

Only 8 days before Election day and a new president will be born from its ashes like the 100 year-old phoenix. The event is treated by people like the ghost of a village clown that everybody knows and ignores. An election, in theory and practice, is the time when power holders pretend to dialogue with people. Power holders don't fancy doing that here, possibly never have since independence, but hey, the media have got to make a living so they're doing the dialogue all among themselves. People, as per usual, are completely ignored, and they give it back so well.  No matter, we can still have some fun and some British fun: bets! C'mon. Roll the dice. 9 April – How many public letters are in the mix? Public letters from a variety of Algerian personalities abound these days in the press. Love mail. Hate mail. Especially content-poor mail. The spaghetti Western between Benouari and Hanoune continues in a face-off fashion. Ali Benouari’s latest challenge to...