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Fisherman's Blues
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  • Published: 12 March 2019
  • ISBN: 9781594634871
  • Imprint: Riverhead
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Fisherman's Blues

A West African Community at Sea

Formats & editions
EBook
13 Mar 2018
Audiobook
13 Mar 2018
Paperback
12 Mar 2019
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An intimate account of life in a West African fishing village, tugged by currents ancient and modern, and dependent on an ocean that is being radically transformed.

The sea is broken, fishermen say. The sea is empty. The genii have taken the fish elsewhere.

For centuries, fishermen have launched their pirogues from the Senegalese port of Joal, where the fish used to be so plentiful a man could dip his hand into the grey-green ocean and pull one out as big as his thigh. But in an Atlantic decimated by overfishing and climate change, the fish are harder and harder to find.

Here, Badkhen discovers, all boundaries are permeable--between land and sea, between myth and truth, even between storyteller and story. Fisherman's Blues immerses us in a community navigating a time of unprecedented environmental, economic, and cultural upheaval with resilience, ingenuity, and wonder.
  • Published: 12 March 2019
  • ISBN: 9781594634871
  • Imprint: Riverhead
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

About the author

Anna Badkhen

Anna Badkhen has spent most of her life in the Global South. Her immersive investigations of the world's iniquities have yielded six books of literary nonfiction, most recently Fisherman’s Blues. She has written about a dozen wars on three continents, and her essays and dispatches appear in periodicals and literary magazines such as the New York Review of Books, Granta, The Common, Guernica and the New York Times. Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones.

portrait photo of Anna Badkhen

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Praise for Fisherman's Blues

Praise for Fisherman's Blues:

"No polemical treatise, Badkhen's Fisherman's Blues offers a critical take through subtle and beautiful methods of storytelling. It creates a remarkable snapshot of lives we'd otherwise never know." -Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"In elegiac vignettes, Badkhen portrays the trick and snare of a heroic and punishing profession...Fisherman's Blues is Badkhen's ode to a community's fraught ties to geography, and a gentle lament for an existence eroding at the shoreline." -Dallas Morning News

"In the span of 300 pages, Anna Badkhen will transform you from knowing nothing about this Senegalese community to being completely transfixed by their stories." -Paste Magazine