Dib, Mohammed: L.A. Trip: A Novel in Verse

Green Integer, paperback

Translated by Paul Vangelisti

Publication Date: November 1, 2003

Publisher Marketing: 

The great Algerian novelist and poet Mohammed Dib wrote L.A. Trip in response to a stay in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Two years before completing it, he contacted the Green Integer publisher, asking for a Thomas Guide map of the city.

L.A. Trip tells of an Old World man’s tribulations in the New World, and revives as well a tradition somewhat lost from sight, “the novel in verse,” which the author describes as an “anti­depressant” to poetry’s “ectoplasmic days, languishing, exhausted by a breathless impressionism.”

Dib saw L.A. Trip as a bilingual edition. He sent it to translator Paul Vangelisti, and looked forward to a trip to the United States in 2003 to celebrate its publication. In May of that year, however, he suddenly died of complications from diabetes.

Born in 1920 in Tlemcen, Algeria, Dib moved to Paris in 1959, after publishing his fiction trilogy L’Incendie. Among his other major works are Dieu en barbarie, Que se souvient de la mer, La Danse du roi, La Nuit sauvage, and L’Enfant-jazz. In 1994, he received the Franco­phone Grand Prix, the highest literary prize awarded by the Académie Française.