In Port-au-Prince

Dany Laferrière is known for writing novels that tend to be autobiographical or at least autofictional. He talks about his immigration to Montreal from Port-au-Prince and his early days as a writer in his 1985 debut, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (later published in English as How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired). Memories of his childhood drive Le Goût des jeunes filles, from 1992 (translated as Dining with the Dictator in 1994). He has also penned some remarkable and very personal works of non-fiction. In Tout bouge autour de moi, he relates the experience of finding himself in Haiti during the 2010 earthquake, on the heels of receiving the prestigious Prix Médicis (The World Is Moving Around Me was published two years later). Quite a few others remain, regrettably, untranslated, such as his remarkable essay collections L’Art presque perdu de ne rien faire (The almost lost...