Cécile David-Weill and Caroline Weber will moderate our group discussion on Alain Mabanckou’s Black Moses, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson (The New Press).
Black Moses is the picaresque and wildly entertaining story of a boy in the Congo who escapes a terrifying orphanage and ends up being raised by a group of thieves in Pointe-Noire in the 1970s and 1980s. A rollicking and charming novel that has been described as being like Oliver Twist in 1970s Congo-Brazzaville.

The Albertine Book Club is free and open to Albertine members and students with a valid student ID card! Join the Albertine community and engage with French culture at a whole new level! Here is a unique opportunity to meet and talk with other French culture lovers over a glass of French wine ! French and English speakers are welcome ! Please find more info on how to become an Albertine member here.

CECILE DAVID-WEILL is a French and American author. She published her first novel, Beguin (Grasset, 1996) under the name of Cécile de la Baume, which was released in English translation as Crush (Grove, 1997). She is the author of Femme de (Grasset, 2002), Les Prétendants (Grasset, 2010, translated into English as The Suitors (Other Press, 2012). Cécile David-Weill is also a regular contributor to the online French news magazine Le Point with a column entitled Letters from New York. She has recently published Parents sous influence: Est-on condamné à reproduire l’éducation de ses parents ? (Odile Jacob, 2016).

CAROLINE WEBER received her Ph.D. in French literature from Yale University (1998) and her BA in Literature from Harvard University (summa cum laude, 1991). Before coming to Barnard/Columbia, she taught for seven years at the University of Pennsylvania.
A specialist in eighteenth-century French literature and culture, with particular emphasis on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Weber is the author of Terror and its Discontents: Suspect Words and the French Revolution (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), and of Fragments of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2001), an edited volume of essays on revolutionary culture. More recently, she published Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the French Revolution (Henry Holt, 2006/Picador, 2007). A study of the political impact of Marie-Antoinette’s controversial clothing choices, Queen of Fashion made the LA Times best-seller list and was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Book World and Borders Books and Music. Her new book, Proust’s Duchess, will be published next May, with Knopf.