Search results for ""Author Edwidge Danticat""

A collection of exceptional new essays by one of the most significant contemporary writers on the world stage Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat's childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We're Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience.From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides in both tragedies and triumphs.Danticat is an irresistible presen

Read more less

"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them."--Create Dangerously In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus' lecture, "Create Dangerously," and combining memoir and essay, Danticat tells the stories of artists, including herself, who create despite, or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them. Danticat eulogizes an aunt who guarded her family's homestead in the Haitian countryside, a cousin who died of AIDS while living in Miami as an undocumented alien, and a renowned Haitian radio journalist whose political assassination shocked the world. Danticat writes about the Haitian novelists she first read as a girl at the Brooklyn Public Library, a woman mutilated in a machete attack who became a public witness against torture, and the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists of Haitian descent. Danticat also suggests that the aftermaths of natural disasters in Haiti and the United States reveal that the countries are not as different as many Americans might like to believe. Create Dangerously is an eloquent and moving expression of Danticat's belief that immigrant artists are obliged to bear witness when their countries of origin are suffering from violence, oppression, poverty, and tragedy.

Read more less

Claire goes missing the night her father agrees to give her up for adoption. Her mother died when she was born. In the tiny fishing town of Ville Rose, Haiti, she and her father are not the only ones to have experienced loss. As the poor townspeople search by moonlight for the seven-year-old girl, each remembers what death has stolen from their own lives: a forbidden love cut down by slum gangsters; a mother whose rare affluence could not save her child. In prose that shimmers with folkloric imagery, Danticat intertwines their stories to reveal a deep connection between locals of distinct classes and creeds. Her vision of modern Haiti makes the unknowable familiar; like the townspeople, the reader shares a common humanity - always caught between the darkness and the light.

Read more less

Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat''s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We''re Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience.From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides in both tragedies and triumphs.Danticat is an irresistible presence on the page: full of heart, outrage, humor, clear thinking, and moral questioning, while reminding us of the possibil

Read more less

'A vision of female solidarity which transcends place and time' Sunday Times: Edwidge Danticat's groundbreaking debut.At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child shouldever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti - to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary debut, Danticat evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti - and the enduring strength of Haiti's women - with vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage.

Read more less

The dew breaker is a quiet man, a husband and father, a hard-working barber, a kindly landlord to the men living in a basement apartment in his home. He is a fixture in his Brooklyn neighbourhood, recognizable by the terrifying scar on his face. But beneath the surface of this American life lies a dangerous truth: the brutal crimes committed in the country of his birth.As his story unfolds, we enter the lives of those around him: his devoted wife and rebellious daughter, his sometimes unsuspecting, sometimes apprehensive neighbours, tenants, and clients. And in the Haiti of the dew breaker's past, we witness his last, desperate act of violence, and his first encounter with the woman who will offer him a form of redemption-albeit imperfect-that will change him forever . . . By the author of The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker is a wonderful novel of interconnected lives-a book of love, remorse, and hope; of rebellions both personal and political; of the compromises often necessary after the most intimate brushes with history.

Read more less

Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys’s return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind. A new introduction by the award-winning Edwidge Danticat, author most recently of Claire of the Sea Light, expresses the enduring importance of this work. Drawing on her own Caribbean background, she illuminates the setting’s impact on Rhys and her astonishing work.

Read more less

It is 1937, and Amabelle Desir is a young Haitian woman working as a maid for a wealthy family in the Dominican Republic, across the border from her homeland. The Republic, under the iron rule of the Generalissimo, treats the Haitians as second-class citizens, and although Amabelle feels a strong sense of loyalty to her employers, especially since her own parents drowned crossing the river from Haiti, racial tensions are heightened when Amabelle's boss accidentally kills a Haitian in a car accident. The accident is a catalyst for a systematic round-up of Haitians, ostensibly for repatriation but in fact a prelude to slaughter. Amabelle, caught up in the chaos and confusion, returns to Haiti after much hardship to make a new life, but is for years uncertain of the fate of her lover, Sebastian, and haunted by a nagging sense of guilt.A powerful, fiercely economical and deceptively moving work, blending historical accuracy with lyrical brilliance.

Read more less

From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying, a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love.AUGUST 2020 REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICKWINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDWINNER OF THE STORY PRIZEWINNER OF THE 2020 VILCEK PRIZE IN LITERATURE Rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity, set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, Everything Inside is at once wide in scope and intimate, as it explores the forces that pull us together, or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.In these eight powerful, emotionally absorbing stories, a romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends; a marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences; a young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival; two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives; a baby's christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new; a man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose. This is the indelible work of a keen observer of the human heart--a master.

Read more less

'Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.'Originally published in 1953, Go Tell it on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual and moral struggle towards self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.

Read more less

Spanning a period of over three hundred years and twenty-five countries, The Penguin Book of Migration Literature is a wide-ranging anthology that brings together well-known authors such as Mohsin Hamid, Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie alongside emerging writers like Deepak Unnikrishnan, Warsan Shire and Djamila Ibrahim.A compelling and original collection of migration writings, this is a unique work that conveys the intricacies of worldwide migration patterns and the diversity of immigrant experiences.

Read more less

Edwidge Danticat's groundbreaking debut, with new introduction from Booker Prize winner Bernardine EvaristoAt the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti - to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence.In her stunning literary debut, Danticat evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti - and the enduring strength of Haiti's women - with vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage.AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB SELECTION 'A vision of female solidarity which transcends place and time' Sunday Times'Exquisite and unforgettable' Washington Post'Extraordinarily successful' New York Times Book Review'A first novel of precious humanity' Independent

Read more less

Can we move beyond borders that divide us without losing our identity? Over the past decade, the yearning for rootedness, for being part of a story bigger than oneself, has flared up as a cultural force to be reckoned with. There’s much to affirm in this desire to belong to a people. That means pride in all that is admirable in the nation to which we belong – and repentance for its historic sins. A focus on national identity, of course, can lead to darker places. The new nationalists, who in Western countries often appeal to the memory of a Christian past, applaud when governments fortify borders to keep out people who are fleeing for their lives. (Needless to say, such actions are contrary to the Christian faith.) Is our yearning for roots doomed to lead to a heartless politics of exclusion? Does maintaining group or national identity require borders guarded with lethal violence? The answer isn’t artificial schemes for universal brotherhood, such as a universal language. Our differences are what make a community human. Might the true ground for community lie deeper even than shared nationality or language? After all, the biblical vision of humankind’s ultimate future has “every tribe and language and people and nation” coming together – beyond all borders but still as themselves. In this issue: - Santiago Ramos describes a double homelessness immigrant children experience as outsiders in both countries. - Ashley Lucas profiles a Black Panther imprisoned for life and looks at the impact on his family. - Simeon Wiehler helps a museum repatriate a thousand human skulls collected by a colonialist. - Yaniv Sagee calls Zionism back to its founding vision of a shared society with Palestinians. - Stephanie Saldaña finds the lost legendary chocolates of Damascus being crafted in Texas. - Edwidge Danticat says storytelling builds a home that no physical separation can take away. - Phographer River Claure reimagines Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince as an Aymara fairy tale. - Ann Thomas tells of liminal experiences while helping families choose a cemetery plot. - Russell Moore challenges the church to reclaim its integrity and staunch an exodus. You’ll also find: - Prize-winning poems by Mhairi Owens, Susan de Sola, and Forester McClatchey - A profile of Japanese peacemaker Toyohiko Kagawa - Reviews of Fredrik deBoer’s The Cult of Smart, Anna Neima’s The Utopians, and Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway - Insights on following Jesus from E. Stanley Jones, Barbara Brown Taylor, Teresa of Ávila, Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King Jr., Eberhard Arnold, Leonardo Boff, Meister Eckhart, C. S. Lewis, Hermas, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus’ message into practice and find common cause with others.

Read more less

Lisette, a Saint-Domingue-born Creole slave and daughter of an African-born bossale, has inherited not only the condition of slavery but the traumatic memory of the Middle Passage as well. The stories told to her by her grandmother and godmother, including the horrific voyage aboard the infamous slave ship Rosalie, have become part of her own story, the one she tells in this haunting novel by the acclaimed Haitian writer Évelyne Trouillot. Inspired by the colonial tale of an African midwife who kept a cord of some seventy knots, each one marking a child she had killed at birth, the novel transports us back to Saint-Domingue, before it became Haiti. The year is 1750, and a rash of poisonings is sowing fear among the plantation masters, already unsettled by the unrest caused by Makandal, the legendary Maroon leader. Through this tumultuous time, Lisette struggles to maintain her dignity and to imagine a future for her unborn child. In telling Lisette’s story, Trouillot gives the revolution that will soon rock the island a human face and at long last sheds light on the invisible women and men of Haitian history. The original French edition of Rosalie l’infâme received the Prix Soroptimist de la romancière francophone, honoring a novel written by a woman from a French-speaking country which showcases the cultural and literary diversity of the French-speaking world.

Read more less

Set during Carnival in Haiti 1938, a young and beautiful woman named Hadriana drinks a mysterious potion on her wedding day and collapses at the altar. She is buried and later resurrected by an evil sorcerer and, as a zombie, enters the collective memory of her town of Jacmel. Hadriana's conversion serves as the inciting incident into an exploration of the strange and esoteric on the island, where Voodoo and Catholicism keep a symbiotic relationship, young women turn into zombies, young men turn into lascivious butterflies and nothing is quite what it seems. Hadriana in All my Dreams is a frolic through mystery and eroticism that reveals vital truths about the nature of humanity.

Read more less

Food – how it’s grown, how it’s shared – makes us who we are. This issue traces the connections between farm and food, between humus and human. According to the first book of the Bible, tending the earth was humankind’s first task: “The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed” (Gen. 2:8). The desire to get one’s hands dirty raising one’s own food, then, doesn’t just come from modern romanticism, but is built into human nature. The title, “The Welcome Table,” comes from a spiritual first sung by enslaved African-Americans. The song refers to the Bible’s closing scene, the wedding feast of the Lamb described in the Book of Revelation, to which every race, tribe, and tongue are invited – a divine pledge of a day of freedom and freely shared plenty, of earth renewed and humanity restored. In the case of food, the symbol is the substance. Every meal, if shared generously and with radical hospitality, is already now a taste of the feast to come. Also in this issue: poetry by Luci Shaw; reviews of books by Julia Child, Robert Farrar Capon, Peter Mayle, Albert Woodfox, and Maria von Trapp; and art by Michael Naples, Sieger Köder, Carl Juste, André Chung, Ángel Bracho, Winslow Homer, Raymond Logan, Sybil Andrews, Cameron Davidson, and Jason Landsel. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus’ message into practice and find common cause with others.

Read more less

Whose lives count as fully human? The answer matters for everyone, disabled or not.The ancient Greek ideal linked physical wholeness to moral wholeness – the virtuous citizen was “beautiful and good.” It’s an ideal that has all too often turned deadly, casting those who do not measure up as less than human. In the pre-Christian era, infants with disabilities were left on the rocks; in modern times, they have been targeted by eugenics.Much has changed, thanks to the tenacious advocacy of the disability rights movement. Yesteryear’s hellish institutions have given way to customized educational programs and assisted living centers. Public spaces have been reconfigured to improve access. Therapies and medical technology have advanced rapidly in sophistication and effectiveness. Protections for people with disabilities have been enshrined in many countries’ antidiscrimination laws.But these victories, impressive as they are, mask other realities that collide awkwardly with society’s avowals of equality. Why are parents choosing to abort a baby likely to have a disability? Why does Belgian law allow for euthanasia in cases of disability, even absent a terminal diagnosis or physical pain? Why, when ventilators were in short supply during the first Covid wave, did some states list disability as a reason to deny care?On this theme: - Heonju Lee tells how his son with Down syndrome saved another child’s life.- Molly McCully Brown and Victoria Reynolds Farmer recount their personal experiences with disability.- Amy Julia Becker says meritocracies fail because they value the wrong things.- Maureen Swinger asks six mothers around the world about raising a child with disabilities.- Joe Keiderling documents the unfinished struggle for disability rights.- Isaac T. Soon wonders if Saint Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” was a disability.- Leah Libresco Sargeant reviews What Can a Body Do? and Making Disability Modern.- Sarah C. Williams says testing for fetal abnormalities is not a neutral practice.Also in the issue: - Ross Douthat is brought low by intractable Lyme disease.- Edwidge Danticat flees an active shooter in a packed mall.- Eugene Vodolazkin finds comic relief at funerals, including his own father’s.- Kelsey Osgood discovers that being an Orthodox Jew is strange, even in Brooklyn.- Christian Wiman pens three new poems.- Susannah Black profiles Flannery O’Conner.- Our writers review Eyal Press’s Dirty Work, Steve Coll’s Directorate S, and Millennial Nuns by the Daughters of Saint Paul.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

Read more less