Search results for ""author jamaica kincaid""

Xuela Claudette Richardson is recalling the last seventy years of her life, and so she must begin with her birth, and the accompanying death of her mother.Xuela’s vivid, visceral recollections of the lonely, unsettled life that follows the trauma of her arrival include that of her distant father, who sends her away to another household at the earliest opportunity; of her passion for the stevedore Roland, who fulfils her sexually but not intellectually; and of her husband, who provides her with status and a wealthy lifestyle but whom she is incapable of loving.Poetic and disturbing, The Autobiography of My Mother is one of Kincaid’s most powerful statements of Afro-Caribbean women’s struggle for identity and independence, against a hostile backdrop of sexism and colonialism.Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.

Read more less

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John's, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and My Brother. She lives with her family in Vermont.

Read more less

The essential, urgent coming-of-age novel by Jamaica Kincaid, a reinventor of the form.Since her first, prizewinning collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid's work has been met with nothing short of amazement. The New York Times hailed her prophetic power and the Los Angeles Times Book Review said, No one else seems to be writing quite this way.With Annie John, the story of a young girl coming of age in Antigua, Kincaid tore open the theme that lies at the heart of her fierce, incantatory novels: the ambivalent and essential bonds created by a mother's love. In this book, written in Kincaid's lucid, elemental style, Annie John's ambivalence is universally familiar and wrenchingly real.

Read more less

In this acclaimed travel memoir Jamaica Kincaid chronicles a spectacular and exotic three-week trek through the Himalayan land of Nepal, where she and her companions are gathering seeds for planting at home. The natural world and, in particular, plants and gardening are central to Kincaid’s work. Among Flowers intertwines meditations on nature and stunning descriptions of the Himalayan landscape with observations on the ironies, difficulties and dangers of this magnificent journey.For Kincaid and three botanist friends, Nepal is a paradise, a place where a single day’s hike can traverse climate zones, from subtropical to alpine, encompassing flora suitable for growing at their homes, from Wales to Vermont. Yet as she makes clear, there is far more to this foreign world than rhododendrons that grow thirty feet high. Danger, too, is a constant companion – and the leeches are the least of their worries. Unpredictable Maoist guerrillas live in these perilous mountains, and when they do appear – as they do more than once – their enigmatic presence lingers long after they have melted back into the landscape. And Kincaid, who writes of the looming, lasting effects of colonialism in her works, necessarily explores the irony of her status as memsahib with Sherpas and bearers.A wonderful blend of introspective insight and beautifully rendered description, Among Flowers is a vivid, engrossing, and characteristically frank memoir from one of the most striking voices in contemporary literature.Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best in modern literature.

Read more less

‘If revenge is a dish best served cold, See Now Then is a baked alaska in reverse, chilling on the outside, screaming hot at the center’ - New York TimesMr and Mrs Sweet live in a house in the small town of Bennington, New England. While Mr Sweet grew up in the dining rooms of the Plaza Hotel and in the audience of the city ballet, Mrs Sweet arrived in the United States on a banana boat, sailing from Dominica.A blazing, unflinching portrait of a couple trying to make sense of the relationship they’ve settled for, See Now Then is the first novel in a decade from Jamaica Kincaid, one of today’s most celebrated writers.Now in the Picador Collection.

Read more less

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John's, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and My Brother. She lives with her family in Vermont.

Read more less

A startlingly beautiful novel about marriage by one of our most scouringly vivid writers (The New York Times Book Review).In See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid's brilliant and evocative novel, a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her charactersa mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New Englandas they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future: for, as she writes, the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then. Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear.See Now Then is Kincaid's attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed

Read more less

The revelatory (The New York Review of Books) story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home. Jamaica Kincaid's first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate chauffeur who makes his living along the wide, open roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air.As Mr. Potter's narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, damaged community. Amid his surroundings, he struggles to live at ease: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, and to shake off the encumbrance of his daughtersone of whom will return to Antigua after he dies and tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy.In Mr. Potter, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any other in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unex

Read more less

Jamaica Kincaid's collected writings for The New Yorker's Talk of the Town record her first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York.Talk Stories is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for The New Yorker's Talk of the Town, composed during the time when she first arrived in the United States from Antigua, from 1978 to 1983. Kincaid developed a unique voice, both in sync with William Shawn's tone for the quintessential elite magazine and (though unsigned) all her ownwonderingly alive to the ironies and screwball details that characterized her adopted city. The book also reflects Kincaid's development as a young writerthe newcomer who sensitively records her impressions here takes root to become one of our most respected authors.

Read more less

At the Bottom of the River is Jamaica Kincaid’s first published work, a selection of inter-connected prose poems told from the perspective of a young Afro-Caribbean girl.Collecting pieces written for the New Yorker and the Paris Review between 1978 and 1982, including the seminal ‘Girl’, these stunning works announced a fully-formed, generational talent and firmly established the themes that Kincaid would continue to return to in her later work: the loss of childhood, the fractious nature of mother–daughter relationships, the intangible beauty of the natural world, and the striving for independence in a colonial landscape.Powerful and lyrical, this is an unforgettable collection from a unique and necessary literary voice.Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.

Read more less

Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. At first glance Lewis and Mariah are a blessed couple – handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Almost at once, however, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade.With a mixture of anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the privileged, facile world of her employers while comparing it to the vivid realities of her home in the Caribbean. Lucy has no illusions about her own past, but neither is she prepared to be deceived about where she presently is.In this environment a new person unfolds: passionate, sexually forthright, and disarmingly honest. In Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid has created a startling new character: a captivating heroine possessed with clear-sightedness and ferocious integrity.Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.

Read more less

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John's, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and My Brother. She lives with her family in Vermont.

Read more less

The essential coming-of-age novel by Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. Kincaid''s novel focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood. Annie''s voiceurgent, demanding to be heardis one that will not soon be forgotten by readers.An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence, who is the very center of the little girl''s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother''s benign shadow. Looking back on her childhood, she reflects, It was in such a paradise that I lived. When she turns twelve, however, Annie''s life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she instinctively rebels against authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing

Read more less

A haunting and tragicomic tale of the end of childhood, Annie John is told with Jamaica Kincaid’s trademark candour and complexity, and is a true coming-of-age classic.An adored only child growing up in Antigua, Annie has until recently lived a peaceful and content life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful and influential presence, who sits at the very centre of the little girl’s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother’s shadow.When she turns twelve, however, Annie’s life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she makes rebellious friends and frequently challenges authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing Annie as a ‘young lady’, ceases to be the source of unconditional adoration and takes on the new and unfamiliar guise of adversary.Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

Read more less

A unique collaboration from two of America's leading artists that explores the fascinating and hidden history of the plant world.In this witty, deeply original book, the renowned novelist Jamaica Kincaid offers an ABC of the plants that define our world and reveals the often brutal history behind them.Kara Walker, one of America's greatest visual artists, illustrates each entry with provocative, brilliant, enthralling, many-layered watercolors.There has never been a book like An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Childrenso inventive, surprising, and telling about what our gardens reveal.

Read more less

The visionary masterpiece, tracing a riverboat crew's dreamlike jungle voyage ...'My new all time favourite book ... A magnificent, breathtaking and terrifying novel.' Tsitsi Dangarembga'An exhilarating experience ... Makes visions real and reality visions ... Genius.' Jamaica Kincaid'A masterpiece: I love this book for its language, adventure and wisdoms.' Monique Roffey'Revel in the inviolate, ever-deepening mystery of Wilson Harris's work.' Jeet Thayil'The Guyanese William Blake . Such poetic intensity.' Angela CarterI dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ...A crew of men are embarking on a voyage up a turbulent river through the rainforests of Guyana. Their domineering leader, Donne, is the spirit of a conquistador, obsessed with hunting for a mysterious woman and exploiting indigenous people as plantation labour. But their expedition is plagued by tragedies, haunted by drowned ghosts: spectres of the crew themselves, inhabiting a blurred shadowland between life and death. As their journey into the interior - their own hearts of darkness - deepens, it assumes a spiritual dimension, guiding them towards a new destination: the Palace of the Peacock ... A modernist fever dream; prose poem; modern myth; elegy to victims of colonial conquest: Wilson Harris' masterpiece has defied definition for over sixty years, and is reissued for a new generation of readers.'One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating.' Guardian'Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.' Observer'Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.' The Times'The most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking Caribbean.' Fred D'Aguiar'Extraordinary ... Courageous and visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues.' Pauline Melville

Read more less