When Haitians tell a story, they say "Krik?" and the eager listeners answer "Krak!" In Krik? Krak! Danticat establishes herself as the latest heir to that narrative tradition with nine stories that encompass both the cruelties and the high ideals of Haitian life. They tell of women who continue loving behind prison walls and in the face of unfathomable loss; of a people who resist the brutality of their rulers through the powers of imagination. The result is a collection that outrages, saddens, and transports the reader with its sheer beauty.

C. L. R. James's pioneering account of the 1791 San Domingo slave revolt and the creation of the republic of Haiti changed the way colonial history was written. By putting the experiences of the slave rebels, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, centre stage, James made them agents of their own story. His work, written as part of the fight to end colonialism in Africa, helped inspire radical liberation movements worldwide, from Black Power to Castro's revolution in the Caribbean.

The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's first independent black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony's black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. Black Spartacus draws on a wealth of archival material, much of it overlooked by previous biographers, to follow every step of Louverture's singular journey.