Download or read book A View of the Empire at Sunset written by Caryl Phillips and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning author Caryl Phillips presents a biographical novel of the life of Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, which she wrote as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Caryl Phillips’s A View of the Empire at Sunset is the sweeping story of the life of the woman who became known to the world as Jean Rhys. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica at the height of the British Empire, Rhys lived in the Caribbean for only sixteen years before going to England. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a look into her tempestuous and unsatisfactory life in Edwardian England, 1920s Paris, and then again in London. Her dream had always been to one day return home to Dominica. In 1936, a forty-five-year-old Rhys was finally able to make the journey back to the Caribbean. Six weeks later, she boarded a ship for England, filled with hostility for her home, never to return. Phillips’s gripping new novel is equally a story about the beginning of the end of a system that had sustained Britain for two centuries but that wreaked havoc on the lives of all who lived in the shadow of the empire: both men and women, colonizer and colonized. A true literary feat, A View of the Empire at Sunset uncovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by offering a look into the life of one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century and retelling a profound story that is singularly its own.

Download or read book The Lost Child written by Caryl Phillips and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover this heartrending story of orphans, outcasts and the grip of the past from award-winning novelist Caryl Phillips – inspired by Wuthering Heights. It is the 1960s. Isolated from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, Monica Johnson raises her sons in the shadow of the wild Yorkshire moors. But when her younger son Tommy, a loner who is bullied at school, disappears, the family bond is demolished – with devastating consequences. Deftly intertwined with this modern narrative is the story of the ragged childhood of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, one of literature’s most enigmatic lost boys. Recovering the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, The Lost Child is an exquisite novel about exile, freedom and what it is to belong. ‘Heartbreaking...compelling’ Independent

Download or read book Crossing the River written by Caryl Phillips and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction Caryl Phillips’ ambitious and powerful novel spans two hundred and fifty years of the African diaspora. It tracks two brothers and a sister on their separate journeys through different epochs and continents: one as a missionary to Liberia in the 1830s, one a pioneer on a wagon trail to the American West later that century, and one a GI posted to a Yorkshire village in the Second World War. ‘Epic and frequently astonishing’ The Times ‘Its resonance continues to deepen’ New York Times

Download or read book The Nature of Blood written by Caryl Phillips and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-09-23 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A German Jewish girl whose life is destroyed by the atrocities of World War II . . . her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood . . . the Jews of a 15th-century Italian ghetto . . Othello, newly arrived in Venice . . . a young Ethiopian Jewish woman resettled in Israel. These are the extraordinary people who inhabit Caryl Phillips' eloquent and moving new novel, and whose stories are connected by circumstance, spirit, and blood across the centuries.

Download or read book The Final Passage written by Caryl Phillips and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-09-13 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the British-West Indian novelist who is rapidly emerging as the bard of the African diaspora comes a haunting work about “the final passage”—the exodus of black West Indians from their impoverished islands to the uncertain opportunities of England. In her village of St. Patrick’s, Leila Preston has no prospects, a young son, and a husband, Michael, who seems to prefer the company of his mistress. So when her ailing mother travels to England for medical care, Leila decides to follow her. As Caryl Phillips follows the Prestons’ outward voyage—and their bewildered attempt to find a home in a country whose rooming houses post signs announcing “No vacancies for coloureds”—he produces a tragicomic portrait of hope and dislocation. The Final Passage is a novel rich in language, acute in its grasp of character, and unforgettable in its vision of the colonial legacy. “Like Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, Phillips writes of times so heady and chaotic and of characters so compelling that time moves as if guided by the moon and dreams.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

Download or read book A Distant Shore written by Caryl Phillips and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved to a housing estate in a small village. Solomon is a night-watchman, an immigrant from an unnamed country in Africa. Each is desperate for love. And yet each harbors secrets that may make attaining it impossible. With breathtaking assurance and compassion, Caryl Phillips retraces the paths that lead Dorothy and Solomon to their meeting point: her failed marriage and ruinous obsession with a younger man, the horrors he witnessed as a soldier in his disintegrating native land, and the cruelty he encounters as a stranger in his new one. Intimate and panoramic, measured and shattering, A Distant Shore charts the oceanic expanses that separate people from their homes, their hearts, and their selves.

Download or read book The European Tribe written by Caryl Phillips and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-09-13 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this richly descriptive and haunting narrative, Caryl Phillips chronicles a journey through modern-day Europe, his quest guided by a moral compass rather than a map. Seeking personal definition within the parameters of growing up black in Europe, he discovers that the natural loneliness and confusion inherent in long jorneys collides with the bigotry of the "European Tribe"-a global community of whites caught up in an unyielding, Eurocentric history. Phillips deftly illustrates the scenes and characters he encounters, from Casablanca and Costa del Sol to Venice, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Moscow. He ultimately discovers that "Europe is blinded by her past, and does not understand the high price of her churches, art galleries, and history as the prison from which Europeans speak." In the afterword to the Vintage edition, Phillips revisits the Europe he knew as a young man and offers fresh observations.

Download or read book Conversations with Caryl Phillips written by Caryl Phillips and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with the acclaimed Anglo-Caribbean author of Dancing in the Dark, A Distant Shore, and Foreigners

Download or read book Cambridge written by Caryl Phillips and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cambridge is a powerful and haunting novel set in that uneasy time between the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves. It is the story of Emily Cartwright, a young woman sent from England to visit her father's West Indian plantation, and Cambridge, a plantation slave, educated and Christianised by his first master in England and now struggling to maintain his dignity.

Download or read book Dancing In The Dark written by Caryl Phillips and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-07-28 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.' This is how W.C. Fields described Bert Williams, the highest-paid entertainer in America in his heyday and someone who counted the King of England and Buster Keaton among his fans. Born in the Bahamas, he moved to California with his family. Too poor to attend Stanford University, he took to life on the stage with his friend George Walker. Together they played lumber camps and mining towns until they eventually made the agonising decision to 'play the coon'. Off-stage, Williams was a tall, light-skinned man with marked poise and dignity; on-stage he now became a shuffling, inept 'nigger' who wore blackface make-up. As the new century dawned they were headlining on Broadway. But the mask was beginning to overwhelm Williams and he sank into bouts of melancholia and heavy drinking, unable to escape the blackface his public demanded.

Download or read book Color Me English written by Caryl Phillips and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2011-07-19 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in St. Kitts and brought up in the UK, bestselling author Caryl Phillips has written about and explored the experience of migration for more than thirty years through his spellbinding and award-winning novels, plays, and essays. Now, in a magnificent and beautifully written new book, Phillips reflects on the shifting notions of race, culture, and belonging before and after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Color Me English opens with an inspired story from his boyhood, a poignant account of a shared sense of isolation he felt with the first Muslim boy who joined his school. Phillips then turns to his years living and teaching in the United States, including a moving account of the day the twin towers fell. We follow him across Europe and through Africa while he grapples with making sense of colonial histories and contemporary migrations—engaging with legendary African, African American, and international writers from James Baldwin and Richard Wright to Chinua Achebe and Ha Jin who have aspired to see themselves and their own societies more clearly. A truly transnational reflection on race and culture in a post-9/11 world, Color Me English is a stunning collection of writing that is at once timeless and urgent.

Download or read book The Right Set written by Caryl Phillips and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-04-28 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From stately lawns and gentlemen players to Andre Agassi and Venus Williams: 65 great writings on tennis that chronicle the transformation of the sport. Since its inception, tennis has embraced traditions more patrician than plebeian. But times--and tennis--have changed. The game once reserved for royalty has moved from estate lawns to the concrete courts of the city. Old guard amateurs have given way to prodigies plastered with corporate logos. And while barriers of gender, race, and class have been shattered, the modern plagues of self-promotion, the paparazzi, and challengers of ever-escalating talent loom large. In The Right Set, award-winning novelist and editor Caryl Phillips presents a collection of writings on the remarkable evolution of a gentleman's pastime into a sport of jet-set players of athletic and psychological genius. Here are the stories of champions, from the Renshaw twins to "ghetto Cinderella" Venus Williams. Here, too, are volleys between tradition and innovation--debates on everything from etiquette and earnings to André Agassi's rejection of the customary tennis whites. Insightful, informative, wonderfully entertaining, The Right Set is as colorful and surprising as the game itself. John McPhee on Ashe vs. Graebner David Higdon on Venus Williams James Thurber on Helen Wills Martina Navratilova on Bad Losers Martin Amis on Smashing the Rackets and more

Download or read book Higher Ground written by Caryl Phillips and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-02-22 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Higher Ground, Caryl Phillips presents three characters separated by time and distance but united by the profound sympathy he has for their humanity. In the first story, a young West African is oppressed by the shadow of slavery; in the second an African-American fights to survive solitary confinement without sacrificing his integrity; in the third a Polish refugee struggles to ward off the increasing isolation of a life in exile.

Download or read book A State of Independence written by Caryl Phillips and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bertram Francis is a British West Indian who has spent the last twenty years away from the Caribbean. Now Independence is looming and he is going back to see the end of colonial rule. But the visit is not the nostalgic homecoming he expected and he finds himself an outsider in a place he thought was home. 'Caryl Phillips has proved himself among the best and most productive writers of his generation.' New York Times

Download or read book Extravagant Strangers written by Caryl Phillips and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-05-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare called Othello "an extravagant and wheeling strangers/Of here and every where." In this exciting anthology, Caryl Phillips has collected writings by thirty-nine extravagant strangers: British writers who were born outside of Britain and see it with clear and critical eyes. These eloquent and incisive voices prove that English literature, far from being pure or homogenous, has in fact been shaped and influenced by outsiders for over two hundred years. Here are slave writers, such as Ignatius Sancho, an eighteenth-century African who became a friend to Samuel Jonson and Laurence Sterne; writers born in the colonies, such as Thackeray, Kipling, and Orwell; "subject writers," such as C.L.R. James and V.S. Naipaul, foreign émigrés, such as Joseph Conrad and Kazuo Ishiguro; and postcolonial observers of the British scene, such as Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and Anita Desai. With this eloquent and often inspiring collection, Phillips proves, if proof be needed, that the greatest literature is often born out of irreconcilable tensions between a writer and his or her society.

Download or read book Caryl Phillips written by and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing in the Key of Life is the first critical collection devoted to the British-Caribbean author Caryl Phillips, a major voice in contemporary anglophone literatures. Phillips’s impressive body of fiction, drama, and non-fiction has garnered wide praise for its formal inventiveness and its incisive social criticism as well as its unusually sensitive understanding of the human condition. The twenty-six contributions offered here, including two by Phillips himself, address the fundamental issues that have preoccupied the writer in his now three-decades-long career – the enduring legacy of history, the intricate workings of identity, and the pervasive role of race, class, and gender in societies worldwide. Most of Phillips’s writing is covered here, in essays that approach it from various thematic and interpretative angles. These include the interplay of fact and fiction, Phillips’s sometimes ambiguous literary affiliations, his long-standing interest in the black and Jewish diasporas, his exploration of Britain and its ‘Others’, and his recurrent use of motifs such as masking and concealment. Writing in the Key of Life testifies to the vitality of Phillipsian scholarship and confirms the significance of an artist whose concerns, at once universal and topical, find particular resonance with the state of the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contributors: Thomas Bonnici, Fatim Boutros, Gordon Collier, Sandra Courtman, Stef Craps, Alessandra Di Maio, Malik Ferdinand, Cindy Gabrielle, Lucie Gillet, Dave Gunning, Tsunehiko Kato, Wendy Knepper, Bénédicte Ledent, John McLeod, Peter H. Marsden, Joan Miller Powell, Imen Najar, Caryl Phillips, Renée Schatteman, Kirpal Singh, Petra Tournay–Theodotou, Chika Unigwe, Itala Vivan, Abigail Ward, Louise Yelin

Download or read book Voyage in the Dark written by Jean Rhys and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Prescient and technically astonishing." --Geoff Dyer, GQ