Philip Gourevitch

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. This remarkable debut book from Philip Gourevitch chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Gourevitch his title. With keen dramatic intensity, Gourevitch frames the genesis and horror of Rwanda's "genocidal logic" in the anguish of its aftermath: the mass displacements, the temptations of revenge and the quest for justice, the impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through intimate portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival and on how the new leaders of postcolonial Africa went to war in the Congo when resurgent genocidal forces threatened to overrun central Africa. Can a country composed largely of perpetrators and victims create a cohesive national society? This moving contribution to the literature of witness tells us much about the struggle everywhere to forge sane, habitable political orders, and about the stubbornness of the human spirit in a world of extremity.

Stories from Rwanda

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

Philip Gourevitch's unforgettable modern classic We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families opened our eyes to the 1994 genocide of Rwanda's Tutsi minority: close to a million people murdered by their neighbours in one hundred days. Now Gourevitch brings us a staggeringly vivid and intimate exploration of how killers and survivors live together again in the same communities, grappling with seemingly impossible burdens of memory and forgetting, denial and confession, vengefulness and forgiveness. A fiercely beautiful literary reckoning, You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know is the culmination of twenty-five years of reporting on the aftermath of the slaughter. The book takes its title from a stark Rwandan adage that speaks to the uneasy trade-offs that reconciliation after near-annihilation demands. Since the genocide, Rwanda has engaged in the most ambitious and sweeping process of accountability ever undertaken by any society. "Truth Heals" was the slogan. But truth also wounds. And truth is always contested. As Gourevitch returns repeatedly over the decades to the same families in one small hillside village, their accounts of killing and surviving, and of the life after, inform and enlarge one another, becoming ever more complex and more charged with significance for us all. These stories are at once as essential and as extreme as classical myths, illuminating the ways that we seek, individually and collectively, to negotiate our irreparable pasts in pursuit of a more habitable future. This deeply moving book continuously invites us - as only great writing can - to think, and to think again.

You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know

New York City cop Andy Rosenzweig tracks down a murder suspect Frankie Koehler to California and arrests him after a stakeout at Penn Station. This dramatic story is an evocation of New York City and its criminal underworld in the 1970s.

A Cold Case

This is a second volume of fascinating interviews from one of the world's best loved literary magazines. The encounters between The Paris Review and the world's leading writers have elicited some of the most revelatory and revealing thoughts from the literary masters of our age. Entertaining and thought-provoking, it is essential reading for anyone who cares about writers and writing.

The Paris Review Interviews

With an introduction by Rory Stewart Winner of the Guardian First Book award, a first-hand account one of the defining outrages of modern history. All at once, as it seemed, something we could have only imagined was upon us - and we could still only imagine it. This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real. In 1994, the Rwandan government orchestrated a campaign of extermination, in which everyone in the Hutu majority was called upon to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Close to a million people were slaughtered in a hundred days, and the rest of the world did nothing to stop it. A year later, Philip Gourevitch went to Rwanda to investigate the most unambiguous genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews. Hailed by the Guardian as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of all time, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families is a first-hand account one of the defining outrages of modern history, an unforgettable anatomy of Rwanda's decimation. As riveting as it is moving, it is a profound reckoning with humanity's betrayal and its perseverance.

Philip Gourevitch

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