"This book is about the problems and obstacles that African writers still encounter in their attempt to get published. It is an interesting, informed, and well-documented study that combines writers’ own testimony (based on responses to questionnaires) and factual investigation in order to explore the problem of the “ordeal” of the African writer. The author deals with some of the issues which confront African writers today, including issues of readership and which language to employ, the question of literacy and audience, and the inadequate number of publishing houses on the continent—as well as other obstacles such as censorship, imprisonment, exile, and worse. Several of the chapters shed new light on the publishing history, and author-publisher relations, of some African writers, both with publishers in the countries in the North as well as with African publishers, and the book includes a chapter on “African Writers and the Quest for Publication”, examining the careers of a number of African writers. An overview of “African Publishers, African Publishing” is provided in chapter four. It includes a discussion of the sometimes not very happy relations between African writers and African publishers, and also looks at the obstacles African publishing houses face, and how they treat their authors. The book concludes with a set of recommendations setting out what Charles Larson believes can be done to improve the plight of the African writer, and particularly the next generation of African writers. He also proposes the establishment of a pan-African publishing house, funded by people and institutions both from Africa and the West, with an unpaid advisory board predominantly from the African continent: “crucial to the entire proposal is the belief that Africans should be in control of the publication of their own writers and that the degree of dependence on the West (both financial and editorial) be determined by Africans themselves." (Hans M. Zell, Publishing, Books & Reading in Sub-Saharan Africa, 3d ed. 2008, nr. 1349)