Jamaica Kincaid

The story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home. Jamaica Kincaid's first obssession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur who makes his living along the roads that pass through the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air. Ignoring the legacy...

Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult...

From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal comes an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming of age. Powerful, disturbing, and stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own. Jamaica Kincaid...

"Episodes from the young life of Annie John, aged 10 to 17, as she grows up on the Caribbean island of Antigua. This is a magical coming-of-age tale, ripe with the special ambience of its tropical setting and sustained by Annie's far from naive awareness of the world around her. Death, illness, and poverty intrude on the narrator's perceptive sensibility from time to time, but even these experiences instruct her and expand her understanding of life...

The author of Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother delves into her long-awaited new novel about a complicated modern family, featuring Mr. and Mrs. Sweet and their two children, Heracles and Persephone, who live in the Shirley Jackson house in Vermont. Kincaid discusses her novel with her old friend Ian Frazier (The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days).

Bringing together reporting, profiles, memoir and criticism from The New Yorker to present a bold and complex portrait of black life in America, told through stories of private triumphs and national tragedies, political vision, and artistic inspiration throughout history. "A collection of The New Yorker‘s groundbreaking writing on race in America—including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith,...

Compiles the best literary essays of the year 2019 which were originally published in American periodicals. Compiles a selection of the year's outstanding essays, essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought.