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.”

“The Wrong Side of Privilege” explores the historical development of community partnership frameworks in composition and rhetoric. It begins by situating partnership work within the political and cultural frameworks of the late 20th and early 21st century, including the rise of the conservative right and neoliberal economic policies. Following this introduction, Stephen J. Parks presents a series of essays which provides case studies of what “political work” implied during this period. The essays move in focus from local community contexts, such a neighborhood struggle against gentrification, to global contexts, such as the Syrian conflict and the larger Arab Spring. These essays engage with the leading scholars of community partnership work, such as Eli Goldblatt, Ellen Cushman, Linda Flower, and Paula Mathieu. The book concludes with a dialogue between the author and two global democratic advocates, Eli Goldblatt and Srdja Popović, on the necessity of public work in the face of declining global governance.