A short story collection from Nobel Prize winner J. M. G. Le Clézio offers a poignant and powerful exploration of the lives of the underprivileged and marginalized.

J. M. G. Le Clézio’s On the Wrong Side, a collection of eight short stories, continues the author’s life-long pursuit of granting visibility to the unseen and a voice to the voiceless. Here, the author focuses on the underclasses, primarily children who have been left behind, abandoned, and subjected to unspeakable violence.

In these haunting tales, we encounter Maureez Samson, a mistreated orphan from Rodrigues Island, who, thanks to her exceptional voice, becomes a famous singer and defies all expectations; some young Indians in Darién, a region straddling Panama and Colombia, struggle to raise their young son and save their idyllic land from its invasion and destruction by drug lords; Juanico and Chuche, two slave children who are taken in by the community of Saint Kateri Takakwitha after an arduous and perilous journey; and in Nogales, on the border between Mexico and the United States, the “street rats,” children who cross through the sewers to wreak havoc and perhaps indulge their dreams of life on the other side.

In Le Clézio’s own words, these stories are not simply meant to reveal or describe the plight of the “rejected,” but to “create in the reader a feeling of revolt in the face of the injustice of what is happening to them.”

J. M. G. Le Clézio is a French writer and the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the author of many books, including Mydriasis and To the Icebergs, also published by Seagull Books. Teresa Lavender Fagan is a freelance translator living in Chicago. She has published nearly fifty translations, including works by J. M. G. Le Clézio, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Diane Meur, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, and Florence Noiville, among others.

The Wrong Side
A Luminous Path
La Pichancha
Ghosts In the Street
Love in France
The River Tanier
Hanne
Etrebbema