In 2014 Yasmina Khadra published the novel Qu’attendent les singes. It depicts a negative image of Algeria in the first decade of the 21st century – a country ruled by corrupted elites capable of all crimes. In the same year the writer announced his decision to participate in the presidential election in Algeria. The aim of this article is to analyze Khadra’s latest crime novel and to ask question about the links between the political campaign and the promotion of the book.

Czarny Paryż [The Back Paris] is a crime novel written by Jolanta Fuchsówna, journalist and writer, and Jan Brzękowski, leading poet of the Cracow Avant-garde who lived in Paris, and serialized in the Cracow daily Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny in 1932, but not published as a book. In this article two typescripts of the novel are analyzed and compared with the printed text, taking note of all the corrections and amendments introduced by the authors. An integral supplement to this textual study is an extract from Chapter XIII ‘A Party in the Studio of the Japanese Man’ reproduced in two versions, 1) with footnotes and modernized spelling, and 2) the original text from the typescript with all annotations.