Download or read book The Company of Heaven written by Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2010-10-28 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Iowa Short Fiction Award in honor of James O. Freedman."
Download or read book Krik Krak written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arriving one year after the Haitian-American's first novel (Breath, Eyes, Memory) alerted critics to her compelling voice, these 10 stories, some of which have appeared in small literary journals, confirm Danticat's reputation as a remarkably gifted writer. Examining the lives of ordinary Haitians, particularly those struggling to survive under the brutal Duvalier regime, Danticat illuminates the distance between people's desires and the stifling reality of their lives. A profound mix of Catholicism and voodoo spirituality informs the tales, bestowing a mythic importance on people described in the opening story, "Children of the Sea," as those "in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves." The ceaseless grip of dictatorship often leads men to emotionally abandon their families, like the husband in "A Wall of Fire Rising," who dreams of escaping in a neighbor's hot-air balloon. The women exhibit more resilience, largely because of their insistence on finding meaning and solidarity through storytelling; but Danticat portrays these bonds with an honesty that shows that sisterhood, too, has its power plays. In the book's final piece, "Epilogue: Women Like Us," she writes: "Are there women who both cook and write? Kitchen poets, they call them. They slip phrases into their stew and wrap meaning around their pork before frying it. They make narrative dumplings and stuff their daughter's mouths so they say nothing more." The stories inform and enrich one another, as the female characters reveal a common ancestry and ties to the fictional Ville Rose. In addition to the power of Danticat's themes, the book is enhanced by an element of suspense (we're never certain, for example, if a rickety boat packed with refugees introduced in the first tale will reach the Florida coast). Spare, elegant and moving, these stories cohere into a superb collection.
Download or read book Avengers of the New World written by Laurent DUBOIS and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laurent Dubois weaves the stories of slaves, free people of African descent, wealthy whites and French administrators into an unforgettable tale of insurrection, war, heroism and victory.
Download or read book Haiti Noir 2 written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories of crime and corruption set in this Caribbean country by Edwidge Danticat, Roxane Gay, Dany Laferrière, and more. These darkly suspenseful stories offer a deeper and more nuanced look at a nation that has been plagued by poverty, political upheaval, and natural disaster, yet endures even through the bleakest times. Filled with tough characters and twisting plots, they reveal the multitude of human stories that comprise the heart of Haiti. Classic stories by Danielle Legros Georges, Jacques Roumain, Ida Faubert, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Jan J. Dominique, Paulette Poujol Oriol, Lyonel Trouillot, Emmelie Prophète, Ben Fountain, Dany Laferrière, Georges Anglade, Edwidge Danticat, Michèle Voltaire Marcelin, Èzili Dantò, Marie-Hélène Laforest, Nick Stone, Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell, Myriam J.A. Chancey, and Roxane Gay. “Skillfully uses a popular genre to help us better understand an often frustratingly complex and indecipherable society.” —The Miami Herald “Presents an excellent array of writers, primarily Haitian, whose graphic descriptions portray a country ravaged by corruption, crime, and mystery. . . . A must read for everyone.” —The Caribbean Writer
Download or read book Everything Inside written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • "Unforgettable tales of families and lovers—from Haiti to Miami, Brooklyn, and beyond—often struggling with grief, loss, and missed connections.” —Vanity Fair • A TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick! 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. Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, here are eight emotionally absorbing stories, rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity. At once wide in scope and intimate, Everything Inside explores with quiet power and elegance the forces that pull us together or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.
Download or read book We Are Bridges written by Cassandra Lane and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this evocative memoir, Cassandra Lane deftly uses the act of imagination to reclaim her ancestors’ story as a backdrop for telling her own. The tradition of Black women’s storytelling leaps forward within these pages—into fresh, daring, and excitingly new territory." —Bridgett M. Davis, author of The World According to Fannie Davis When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt's lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town. We Are Bridges turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family—and considers how to take back one’s American story.
Download or read book Behind the Mountains written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lyrical and poignant coming-of-age story about one girl's immigration experience, as she moves from Haiti to New York City, by award-winning author Edwidge Danticat. It is election time in Haiti, and bombs are going off in the capital city of Port-au-Prince. During a visit from her home in rural Haiti, Celiane Espérance and her mother are nearly killed. Looking at her country with new eyes, Celiane gains a fresh resolve to be reunited with her father in Brooklyn, New York. The harsh winter and concrete landscape of her new home are a shock to Celiane, who witnesses her parents' struggle to earn a living and her brother's uneasy adjustment to American society, and at the same time encounters her own challenges with learning and school violence. National Book Award finalist Edwidge Danticat weaves a beautiful, honest, and timely story of the American immigrant experience in this luminous novel about resilience, hope, and family.
Download or read book Ayiti written by Roxane Gay and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times–bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist, a powerful short story collection exploring the Haitian diaspora experience. In Ayiti, a married couple seeking boat passage to America prepares to leave their homeland. A young woman procures a voodoo love potion to ensnare a childhood classmate. A mother takes a foreign soldier into her home as a boarder, and into her bed. And a woman conceives a daughter on the bank of a river while fleeing a horrific massacre, a daughter who later moves to America for a new life but is perpetually haunted by the mysterious scent of blood. Roxane Gay is an award-winning literary voice praised for her fearless and vivid prose, and her debut collection Ayiti exemplifies the raw talent that made her “one of the voices of our age” (National Post, Canada). Praise for Ayiti “Highly dimensioned characters and unforgettable moments. . . . Dismantling the glib misconceptions of her complex ancestral home, Gay cuts and thrills. Readers will find her powerful first book difficult to put down.” —Booklist “The themes explored in Gay’s nonfiction, such as the transactional nature of violence and the ways in which stereotypes of poverty add another layer of dehumanization, are just as potent here. Even her more lyrical mode is filtered through a keen sense of the lost promise of one country and the blinkered privilege of the other. It’s Gay’s unflinching directness—the sense that her characters are in the room with you, telling it like it is—that makes her irresistible.” —Vogue “A set of brief, tart stories mostly set amid the Haitian-American community and circling around themes of violation, abuse, and heartbreak . . . This book set the tone that still characterizes much of Gay’s writing: clean, unaffected, allowing the (often furious) emotions to rise naturally out of calm, declarative sentences. That gives her briefest stories a punch even when they come in at two pages or fewer, sketching out the challenges of assimilation in terms of accents, meals, or ‘What You Need to Know About a Haitian Woman’. . . . This debut amply contains the righteous energy that drives all her work.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Create Dangerously written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book A Miami Herald Best Book of the Year In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile. Inspired by Albert Camus and adapted from her own lectures for Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Lecture Series, here Danticat tells stories of artists who create despite (or because of) the horrors that drove them from their homelands. Combining memoir and essay, these moving and eloquent pieces examine what it means to be an artist from a country in crisis. BONUS MATERIAL: This edition includes an excerpt from Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light.
Download or read book The Art of Death written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author of Claire of the Sea Light Edwidge Danticat’s The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. “Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses,” Danticat notes in her introduction. “I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing.” The book moves outward from the shock of her mother’s diagnosis and sifts through Danticat’s writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison’s Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat’s mother. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.
Download or read book All Souls Rising written by Madison Smartt Bell and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A serious historical novel that reads like a dream." --The Washington Post Book World "One of the most spohisticated fictional treatments of the enduring themes of class, color, and freedom." --San Francisco Chronicle NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST This first installment of the epic Haitian trilogy brings to life a decisive moment in the history of race, class, and colonialism. The slave uprising in Haiti was a momentous contribution to the tide of revolution that swept over the Western world at the end of the 1700s. A brutal rebellion that strove to overturn a vicious system of slavery, the uprising successfully transformed Haiti from a European colony to the world’s first Black republic. From the center of this horrific maelstrom, the heroic figure of Toussaint Louverture–a loyal, literate slave and both a devout Catholic and Vodouisant–emerges as the man who will take the merciless fires of violence and vengeance and forge a revolutionary war fueled by liberty and equality. Bell assembles a kaleidoscopic portrait of this seminal movement through a tableau of characters that encompass black, white, male, female, rich, poor, free and enslaved. Pulsing with brilliant detail, All Soul’s Rising provides a visceral sense of the pain, terror, confusion, and triumph of revolution.
Download or read book Haiti on My Mind written by Dana K. Vincent and published by Youth Communication, New York Center. This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of short essays by Haitian-American teens about their lives and their identity.
Download or read book Walking on Fire written by Beverly Bell and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haiti, long noted for poverty and repression, has a powerful and too-often-overlooked history of resistance. Women in Haiti have played a large role in changing the balance of political and social power, even as they have endured rampant and devastating state-sponsored violence, including torture, rape, abuse, illegal arrest, disappearance, and assassination. Beverly Bell, an activist and an expert on Haitian social movements, brings together thirty-eight oral histories from a diverse group of Haitian women. The interviewees include, for example, a former prime minister, an illiterate poet, a leading feminist theologian, and a vodou dancer. Defying victim status despite gender- and state-based repression, they tell how Haiti's poor and dispossessed women have fought for their personal and collective survival. The women's powerfully moving accounts of horror and heroism can best be characterized by the Creole word istwa, which means both "story" and "history." They combine theory with case studies concerning resistance, gender, and alternative models of power. Photographs of the women who have lived through Haiti's recent past accompany their words to further personalize the interviews in Walking on Fire.
Download or read book The Dew Breaker written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We meet him late in life: a quiet man, a good father and husband, a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a landlord and barber with a terrifying scar across his face. As the book unfolds, moving seamlessly between Haiti in the 1960s and New York City today, we enter the lives of those around him, and learn that he has also kept a vital, dangerous secret. Edwidge Danticat’s brilliant exploration of the “dew breaker”--or torturer--s an unforgettable story of love, remorse, and hope; of personal and political rebellions; and of the compromises we make to move beyond the most intimate brushes with history. It firmly establishes her as one of America’s most essential writers. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light.
Download or read book What Storm What Thunder written by Myriam JA Chancy and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Book Award Winner Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist A NPR, Boston Globe, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and Library Journal Best Book of the Year “Stunning.” —Margaret Atwood At the end of a long, sweltering day, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster—Richard, an expat and wealthy water-bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, Anne, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker, Leopold, who pines for a beautiful call girl; Sonia and her business partner, Dieudonné, who are followed by a man they believe is the vodou spirit of death; Didier, an emigrant musician who drives a taxi in Boston; Sara, a mother haunted by the ghosts of her children in an IDP camp; her husband, Olivier, an accountant forced to abandon the wife he loves; their son, Jonas, who haunts them both; and Ma Lou, the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them all. Brilliantly crafted, fiercely imagined, and deeply haunting, What Storm, What Thunder is a singular, stunning record, a reckoning of the heartbreaking trauma of disaster, and—at the same time—an unforgettable testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit.
Download or read book The Butterfly s Way written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2003-07-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In five sections—Childhood, Migration, Half/First Generation, Return, and Future—the thirty-three contributors to this anthology write movingly, often hauntingly, of their lives in Haiti and the United States. Their dyaspora, much like a butterfly's fluctuating path, is a shifting landscape in which there is much travel between two worlds, between their place of origin and their adopted land. This compilation of essays and poetry brings together Haitian-Americans of different generations and backgrounds, linking the voices for whom English is a first language and others whose dreams will always be in French and Kreyòl. Community activists, scholars, visual artists and filmmakers join renowned journalists, poets, novelists and memoirists to produce a poignant portrayal of lives in transition. Edwidge Danticat, in her powerful introduction, pays tribute to Jean Dominique, a sometime participant in the Haitian dyaspora and a recent martyr to Haiti's troubled politics, and the many members of the dyaspora who refused to be silenced. Their stories confidently and passionately illustrate the joys and heartaches, hopes and aspirations of a relatively new group of immigrants belonging to two countries that have each at times maligned and embraced them. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Download or read book Taste of Salt written by Frances Temple and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1994-08-05 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every Life Makes a Story Djo has a story: Once he was one of "Titid's boys," a vital member of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide's election team, fighting to overthrow military dictatorship in Haiti. Now he is barely alive, the victim of a political firebombing. Jeremie has a story: Convent-educated Jeremie can climb out of the slums of Port-au-Prince. But she is torn between her mother's hopes and her own wishes for herself ... and for Haiti. Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide has a story: A dream of a new Haiti, one in which every person would have a decent life ... a house with a roof ... clean water to drink ... a good plate of rice and beans every day ... a field to work in. At Aristide's request, Djo tells his story to Jeremie -- for Titid believes in the power of all of their stories to make change. As Jeremie listens to Djo, and to her own heart, she knows that they will begin a new story, one that is all their own, together.
