Boris Vian

Fiction. In the tradition of Karl May and Franz Kafka, Boris Vian imagines an America even more amazing than the land he has never visited. I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVES is the first novel to put the quotation marks around the hardboiled thriller--a vivid and startling performance (J. Hoberman). The book is Boris Vian's (1920-1959) sex-and-violence-filled homage to American noir. Originally published in France as J'IRAI CRACHER SUR VOS TOMBES--after allegedly being censored in the U.S. and translated into French--the novel was a best seller, establishing Vian as one of the most famous writers of the mid-twentieth century.

I Spit on Your Graves

Melody Izard

A fitting book to read on the tail of Native Son. The stories take place in about the same time and deal with the subject of an angry black man spiraling down to a hopeless end. In I Spit on Your Graves, however our young man is "passing as white"; knowing that if the people he was hanging out with, drinking with, having sex with, knew that he had the slightest smidgen of black blood, his life would be in danger. His brother was murdered for loving a white girl and now he is out to revenge his brother's death. The book is a violent, sex-filled tiny little thing. The most intriguing thing about it is that it was written by a French man who had never been to the US and who presented the novel as one written by an American author and he had merely translated the story. The French "translation" was written in the 40s but the English version was not published until the late 90s.

I Spit on Your Graves

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