Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. The youngest of four children, highly intelligent, well read, and a charming, handsome, and seductive personality, he had also been involved in a murder at the age of fourteen, adopted the manner of a Rastafarian, and been a heavy user of drugs. A dreamer who aroused both love and anger, he died painfully and alone in his mother's house. Jamaica Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and shockingly frank recounting of her brother's story is also the story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation revolving around the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. The unblinking investigation of a life that ended too early speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.

"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 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." "Misery infects the unstudied, slow pace of the island and Mr. Potter's days. As the narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, crippled community. Kincaid introduces us to Mr. Potter's ancestors - beginning with his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who committed suicide - and the refugees fleeing the collapsing world, who press in on Mr. Potter's life. Amid his surroundings, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters - one of whom will return to Antigua after he dies and tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy."--BOOK JACKET.

"Jamaica Kincaid's inspired, lyrical short stories Reading Jamaica Kincaid is to plunge, gently, into another way of seeing both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her voice is, by turns, naively whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean--family, manners, and landscape--as distilled and transformed by Kincaid's special style and vision. Kincaid leads her readers to consider, as if for the first time, the powerful ties between mother and child; the beauty and destructiveness of nature; the gulf between the masculine and the feminine; the significance of familiar things--a house, a cup, a pen. Transfiguring our human form and our surroundings--shedding skin, darkening an afternoon, painting a perfect place--these stories tell us something we didn't know, in a way we hadn't expected."--Amazon.com.

"Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a square plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced gardener friends, she planted only seeds of flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book):, she gathers together all she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it in the same spirit: generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination."--BOOK JACKET.

The West Indian narrator vents her bitterness at the unhappy life fate dealt her--mother died in childbirth, father ignored her, stepmother tried to kill her, at school she had an abortion. Finally, she married a white doctor, but it was impossible for her to love him because he was a colonialist. She draws parallels with the despair of her country--Dominica--attributing it to the legacy of slavery. By the author of Lucy.

"The passion for gardening and the passion for words come together in this inspired anthology, a collection of essays on topics as diverse as beans and roses, by writers who garden and by gardeners who write. Among the contributors are Christopher Lloyd, on poppies Marina Warner, who remembers the Guinee rose and Henri Cole, who offers poems on the bearded iris and on peonies. There is also an explanation of the sexiness of castor beans from Michael Pollan and an essay from Maxine Kumin on how, as Henry David Thoreau put it, one "[makes] the earth say beans instead of grass." Most of the essays are new in print, but Colette, Katharine S. White, D. H. Lawrence, and several other old favorites make appearances. Jamaica Kincaid, the much-admired writer and a passionate gardener herself, rounds up this diverse crew. A wonderful gift for green thumbs, My Favorite Plant is a happy collection of fresh takes on old friends"--

Since her first, prize-winning 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 right now." 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 all her fierce, incantatory novels: the ambivalent and essential bonds created by a mother's love. In this novel, written in Kincaid's lucid, elemental style, Annie John's ambivalence is universally familiar and wrenchingly real.

In See Now Then, the brilliant and evocative new novel from Jamaica Kincaid--her first in ten years--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 characters--a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England--as 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 what we assumed was clear: that is the beginning, the middle, and the end. Since the publication of her first short-story collection, At the Bottom of the River, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Kincaid has demonstrated a unique talent for seeing beyond and through the surface of things. In See Now Then, she evelops the reader in a world that is both familiar and startling--creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet.

Includes essays by Joseph Brodsky, William H. Gass, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Edward Hoagland, Edna O'Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, John Edgar Wideman, and Tobias Wolff, among others.