"...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 (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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
