Download or read book Understanding Jamaica Kincaid written by Justin D. Edwards and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Jamaica Kincaid introduces readers to the prizewinning author best known for the novels Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother. Justin D. Edwards surveys Jamaica Kincaid's life, career, and major works of fiction and nonfiction to identify and discuss her recurring interests in familial relations, Caribbean culture, and the aftermath of colonialism and exploitation. In addition to examining the haunting prose, rich detail, and personal insight that have brought Kincaid widespread praise, Edwards also identifies and analyzes the novelist's primary thematic concerns - the flow of power and the injustices faced by people undergoing social, economic, and political change. Edwards chronicles Kincaid's childhood in Antigua, her development as a writer, and her early journalistic work as published in the New Yorker and other magazines. In separate chapters he provides critical appraisals of Kincaid's early novels; her works of nonfiction, including My Brother and A Small Place; and her more recent novels, including Mr. Potter. colonization and neocolonization and warns her readers about the dire consequences of inequality in the era of globalization.
Download or read book Annie John written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Everbind. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annie John's story is so touching and familiar it could be happening to any of us, anywhere, any time, any place. And that's exactly the book's strength, its wisdom, its truth. --The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Understanding Jamaica Kincaid s Annie John written by Deborah Mistron and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1999-01-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of thirty primary documents and commentary that provide insight into the historical, social, and cultural contexts of Jamaica Kincaid's 1985 novel "Annie John," with study questions, topics for research papers, and lists of further reading.
Download or read book Annie John written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 1997-06-30 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."
Download or read book Lucy written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2002-09-04 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The coming-of-age story of one of Jamaica Kincaid's most admired creations--available now in an e-book edition. Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to America to work as an au pair for a wealthy couple. She begins to notice cracks in their beautiful façade at the same time that the mysteries of own sexuality begin to unravel. Jamaica Kincaid has created a startling new heroine who is destined to win a place of honor in contemporary fiction.
Download or read book Annie John written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1997-06-30 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fictional account of a young girl's coming of age in Antigua, from a doted upon childhood to an adolescence fraught with events and alliances leading her away from mutual complacent acceptance.
Download or read book A Small Place written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2000-04-28 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Autobiography of My Mother written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 1996-01-15 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution evoked in startling and magical poetry. 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, 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 could 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.
Download or read book See Now Then written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book My Brother written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 1998-11-09 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families. My Brother is a 1997 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.
Download or read book Mr Potter written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2003-07-16 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home: "Kincaid's most poetic and affecting novel to date" (Robert Antoni, The Washington Post Book World) Jamaica Kincaid's first obssession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur who makes his living along the roads that pass through 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. Ignoring the legacy of his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who committed suicide, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease amid his surroundings: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, and 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. In Mr. Potter, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any other in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unexamined life.
Download or read book The Birds of Opulence written by Crystal Wilkinson and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lyrical exploration of love and loss, this book centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern Black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness. The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her own rebellious daughter, Mona. The residents of Opulence struggle with vexing relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality. As the members of the youngest generation watch their mothers and grandmothers pass away, they live with the fear of going mad themselves and must fight to survive. The author offers up Opulence and its people in lush, poetic detail. It is a world of magic, conjuring, signs, and spells, but also of harsh realities that only love - and love that's handed down - can conquer.
Download or read book At the Bottom of the River written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Picador USA. This book was released on 2024-10-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kincaid’s first book, which announced the arrival of a singular talent, “will burn on your shelf” (Derek Walcott). 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 partly 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. Originally published in 1978, At the Bottom of the River immediately established Jamaica Kincaid as an inimitable, vibrant, and hauntingly beautiful voice in contemporary literature.
Download or read book My Garden Book written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2001-05-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of our finest writers on one of her greatest loves. Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced friends, she planted only seeds of the flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book) she gathers all she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination. Kincaid's affections are matched in intensity only by her dislikes. She loves spring and summer but cannot bring herself to love winter, for it hides the garden. She adores the rhododendron Jane Grant, and appreciates ordinary Blue Lake string beans, but abhors the Asiatic lily. The sources of her inspiration -- seed catalogues, the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, gardens like Monet's at Giverny -- are subjected to intense scrutiny. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where she grew up. My Garden (Book) is an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the persons who tend them.
Download or read book In Search of Annie Drew written by Daryl Cumber Dance and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2016-06-20 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is perhaps no other person who has been so often and obsessively featured in any writer’s canon as Jamaica Kincaid’s mother, Annie Drew. In this provocative new book, Daryl Dance argues that everything Kincaid has written, regardless of its apparent theme, actually relates to Kincaid’s efforts to free herself from her mother, whether her subject is ostensibly other family members, her home nation, a precolonial world, or even Kincaid herself.A devoted reader of Kincaid’s work, Dance had long been aware of the author’s love-hate relationship with her mother, but it was not until reading the 2008 essay "The Estrangement" that Dance began to ponder who this woman named Annie Victoria Richardson Drew really was. Dance decided to seek the answers herself, embarking on a years-long journey to unearth the real Annie Drew. Through interviews and extensive research, Dance has pieced together a fuller, more contextualized picture in an attempt to tell Annie Drew’s story. Previous analyses of Kincaid’s relationship with her mother have not gone beyond the writer’s own carefully orchestrated and sometimes contrived portraits of her. In Search of Annie Drew offers an alternate reading of Kincaid’s work that expands our understanding of the object of such passionate love and such ferocious hatred, an ordinary woman who became an unforgettable literary figure through her talented daughter’s renderings.
Download or read book Talk Stories written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Picador USA. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jamaica Kincaid’s collected writings for The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” record her first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York. Talk Stories is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid’s original writing for The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” composed during the time when she first arrived in the United States from Antigua, from 1978 to 1983. Kincaid developed a unique voice, both in sync with William Shawn’s tone for the quintessential elite magazine and (though unsigned) all her own—wonderingly alive to the ironies and screwball details that characterized her adopted city. The book also reflects Kincaid’s development as a young writer—the newcomer who sensitively records her impressions here takes root to become one of our most respected authors.
Download or read book Party A Mystery written by Jamaica Kincaid and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully illustrated story of three girls caught up in the most curious of mysteries. “Party has layers. It functions as a subtle message about what it means to witness horror to such a degree that we lose our language for it; it is a quiet story about coming of age, suddenly, as a young black girl because of what the world shows us. It is about the many words our silence can hold, the way our absences can ring as loudly and discordantly as the words we do feel able to say.” —Literary Hub Three girls—Pam, Bess, and Sue—attend a party to celebrate the publication of the first of the Nancy Drew mystery books. There are many distractions at the fancy affair: flower arrangements, partygoers, refreshments, and lots and lots of marble. Suddenly, the oldest girl, Pam, sees what can only be described as something truly . . . bilious . . . not good! Bess sees it too. The youngest, Sue, does not, and as usual she has a hard time getting anyone to tell her anything. Party: A Mystery is a beautifully drawn adventure story that promises questions that will grab children, but does not guarantee an answer.
