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"...race is a false idea. It's just an invention to enforce power. So I never talk about race. I talk about the inflammatory thing which is power." —Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid Jamaica Kincaid (born Elaine Potter Richardson) is a Caribbean novelist she was born on May 25, 1949 in the city of St. John's on the island of Antigua. 

She is the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. She was also nominated for PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the reciepent of other honors. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.

 

 

 

The Autobiography of My Mother: A NovelThe Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel
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Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 7, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374531870
ISBN-13: 978-0374531874

From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman’s courageous coming-of-age

Powerful, disturbing, 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.

Kincaid takes us from Xuela’s childhood in a home where she can hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela’s is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is “the black room of the world” that is Xuela’s barrenness and motherlessness.

The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one woman’s inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical poetry.

 

See Now Then: A NovelSee Now Then: A Novel
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Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (February 5, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374180563
ISBN-13: 978-0374180560
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches

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, and to make 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 envelops the reader in a world that is both familiar and startling—creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet.

 

 

Annie JohnAnnie John
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Paperback: 148 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First edition (June 30, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374525102
ISBN-13: 978-0374525101
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches

Annie John is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kincaid’s novel focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood. Annie’s voice—urgent, demanding to be heard—is 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 Annie as a “young lady,” ceases to be the source of unconditional adoration and takes on the new and unfamiliar guise of adversary. At the end of her school years, Annie decides to leave Antigua and her family, but not without a measure of sorrow, especially for the mother she once knew and never ceases to mourn. “For I could not be sure,” she reflects, “whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world."

 

At the Bottom of the RiverAt the Bottom of the River
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Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (October 15, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374527342
ISBN-13: 978-0374527341
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.2 inches

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.

 

My BrotherMy Brother
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Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 9, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374525625
ISBN-13: 978-0374525620
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches

My Brother is a 1997 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

Jamaica Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother Devon Drew's life is also the story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. Kincaid's unblinking record of a life that ed too early speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.

 

 A Small PlaceA Small Place
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Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (April 28, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374527075
ISBN-13: 978-0374527075
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches

A brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua--by the author of Annie John

"If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him--why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen . . ."

So begins Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay, which shows us what we have not yet seen of the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up.

Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.

 

Fischl, Eric and Jamaica Kincaid
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. Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip. New York: Knopf, 1986.