Hadriana in All My Dreams

Set during Carnival in Haiti 1938, a young and beautiful woman named Hadriana drinks a mysterious potion on her wedding day and collapses at the altar. She is buried and later resurrected by an evil sorcerer and, as a zombie, enters the collective memory of her town of Jacmel. Hadriana's conversion serves as the inciting incident into an exploration of the strange and esoteric on the island, where Voodoo and Catholicism keep a symbiotic relationship, young women turn into zombies, young men turn into lascivious butterflies and nothing is quite what it seems. Hadriana in All my Dreams is a frolic through mystery and eroticism that reveals vital truths about the nature of humanity.

René Depestre, born in 1926, is one of the most important voices of Haitian literature. A peer of seminal figures Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, and André Breton, Depestre has engaged with the politics/aesthetics of negritude, social realism, and surrealism for more than half a century. Having lived through significant moments in Haitian and New World history-from the overthrow of Haitian dictator Élie Lescot in 1946, to the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956, to a struggle with Haiti's François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier in 1957, to a collaboration with Cuban revo- lutionary Che Guevara and a fraught relationship with Fidel Castro in the 1960s and '70s-Depestre is uniquely positioned to reflect on the extent to which the Americas and Europe are implicated in Haiti's past and present.