Anthony Winkler

"Crocodile" tells the story of Josephine Hemp, a simple but devout Catholic housemaid who feels abused and abandoned by God. To get revenge, she captures a consecrated host which, under the ancient Church doctrine of transubstantiation, is not merely a symbol of the Godhead, but the actual living God miraculously contained in what seems to the unbelieving naked eye a mere wafer. God, impregnated in the host, refuses to discuss his actions with his captor, provoking her to imprisoning the almighty. What follows is an ironic yet entirely logical series of madcap events as the parish priest, alerted to this sacrilege by a philandering Baptist minister, tries to liberate God from unlawful imprisonment. This sprightly fable exploring the incalculable extent to which believers are often driven by their faith, is played out with impeccable logic against the Jamaican countryside over which broods the menacing presence of a river dwelling crocodile. Its resolution will both surprise and delight.

Baps, a Jamaican shopkeeper, drops dead unexpectedly one Saturday morning and finds himself being transported to heaven via a crowded minibus. To enter heaven, he discovers that he must crawl through a culvert in a canefield. Everything about paradise that he had been raised to expect and believe, he finds to be utterly and completely wrong. Baps tells the tale of paradise that suspiciously resembles Jamaica in many ways, "The Duppy" is a fantasy that challenges every preconception about death and the afterlife.

In a new and highly original take on Jamaican life, Winkler, the Caribbean's unrivalled master of adult comedy, introduces the estimable Precious, a large-bottomed, meltingly juicy Christian Jamaican woman with unshakeable ideas on the right and proper behaviour for Christian Jamaican women, their husbands, and men and dogs in general. But when her husband dies unexpectedly, Precious finds her ideas on proper behaviour assailed on every side, first in Kingston with her unwelcoming daughter-in-law, and then in Miami with her guntoting daughter. Precious spends many hours under her bed, checking proprieties with Jamaican Jesus, and on top of her bed, checking improprieties with the factotum Mannish, who is suffering the penalties of stealing camels in a previous life. Obliged to get a job as a dog-maid, however, Precious is outraged to discover that most improper of all are the attentions of her mistress's preposterously pampered pet, Riccardo.

"You learn dat dis world don't love negar And negar don't make for dis world " Zachariah's mother warned him when he was still a boy. Yet, poor and abominably ugly, the Jamaican fisherman grasps lovingly for life, though the worst forces of nature conspire against him. Washed far out to sea in the night, Zachariah is attacked by a hammerhead shark, scorched by the Caribbean sun, hurled about by the sea which both frightens and entices him, and confused by his own encroaching madness. In a rare weave of humor and sadness, Zachariah forces himself to reflect on his life and the strangeness of chance, on anything but his place as a small man in a fragile boat in the boundless sea. Still on land are the villagers, the woman, and the sons who comprise life for Zachariah. While he struggles with the forces of nature, the natural faith of the villagers encounters the incapacity for belief of the troubled English doctor. As the superstitions and certainties of Jamaican life and the consequences of science meet, Winkler reveals a rich understanding of the precarious balance between thought and reality, between the coincidental and the miraculous. "This is one of those rare novels that announces its presence with such modest grace that the size of its ambition and accomplishments steals gently into the consciousness."-Michael Thelwell, Washington Post Book World "Mr. Winkler deftly unfurls his exquisitely written story, which is redolent of the colorful patois and chaotic flavor of rural Jamaican culture."-Bob Allen, Baltimore Sun

From helping you find your voice to guiding you on the latest MLA and APA documentation guidelines, READINGS FOR WRITERS is designed to help you become a more successful writer. Throughout the text, the authors offer helpful commentary, practical tips and suggestions, real student essays, and other writing tools that you can use for any assignment. But even more importantly, they present over 60 readings from a variety of genres and authors that will inspire and inform your writing as you learn what good writing is, and how to create it on your own.

From helping you find your voice to guiding you on the latest MLA and APA documentation guidelines, READINGS FOR WRITERS is designed to help you become a more successful writer. Throughout the text, the authors offer helpful commentary, practical tips and suggestions, real student essays, and other writing tools that you can use for any assignment. But even more importantly, they present over 70 readings from a variety of genres and authors that will inspire and inform your writing as you learn what good writing is, and how to create it on your own. This edition has been updated to reflect guidelines from the 2016 MLA HANDBOOK, Eighth Edition.

From helping you find your voice to guiding you on the latest MLA and APA documentation guidelines, READINGS FOR WRITERS is designed to help you become a more successful writer. Throughout the text, the authors offer helpful commentary, practical tips and suggestions, real student essays, and other writing tools that you can use for any assignment. But even more importantly, they present over 70 readings from a variety of genres and authors that will inspire and inform your writing as you learn what good writing is, and how to create it on your own. Each student text is packaged with a free Cengage Essential Reference Card to the MLA HANDBOOK, Eighth Edition.

'How could I change an outcome that was set in concrete?... This meant plunging into the darkness...'Jamaican writer Anthony C. Winkler has been called 'the unrivalled master of comic writing in the West Indies. Many readers regard his novel "The Lunatic" as among the funniest books in any language. "Trust the Darkness" tells the story of Winkler's development as a writer, and much more. The 'enigmatic Winkler', as one reviewer called him, reveals a troubled childhood. Expelled from school in Montego Bay at the age of fifteen, he spent the next few years getting increasingly frustrated: Winkler knew that he wanted to finish school, and to be a writer, but the future looked dark. Then his mother sent him to the USA; and in that country, after years of deprivation, he gradually found the means to fulfill his ambitions. Over the years Winkler has learnt to trust the darkness. Often, stumped in his effort to find a creative resolution in his writings, he has learnt to begin writing without knowing where he will end up, to plunge into the darkness and tap 'at the roadbed of the narrative like a blind man with a cane searching for a sidewalk'. Teeming with the offbeat occurrences and character types found in his fiction, "Trust the Darkness" is a supremely entertaining chronicle of a life full of hardships and rewards, one often lived on the very edge of darkness.

"The Painted Canoe" is the story of a poor, ugly Jamaican fisherman who falls asleep one night on a fishing trip and wakes up to find his small craft surrounded by the empty horizon with no land in sight. What follows is a heartfelt story of his fight for survival against the sea. His canoe is nearly swamped by a passing freighter; he is stalked, attacked and bitten by a shark; he nearly goes mad from fear and loneliness but still he refuses to give up. To kindle his strength, he daydreams about his wife, his two sons, his dead mother, the pastor of his village church, the English doctor who runs the government health clinic, revealing a tapestry of colorful characters.

Murders, scandals and the pursuit of forbidden pleasures may help to while the time away, but for Montego Bay's elite in the 1950s nothing is as important as the annual yacht race. Winkler interweaves the lives of five Montegonians: Fitzpatrick the barrister, Angwin the magistrate, O'Hara the hotelier, Biddle the reporter - all of whom will eventually compete in the race - and Father Huck, the American priest who ministers over them and tried his best to understand them, while battling with his own conflicts. In so doing, Winkler provides us with an affectionately satirical, hilarious view of a paranoid, hypocritical and eccentric colonialist society, during the twilight of its influence.

This autobiographical account of the year Winkler spent at a rural teacher training college flashes back to the Jamaica of the narrator's childhood, recounting incidents and vignettes that shed light on the muddle of competing personalities, doctrines and images of self, currently vying for centre stage in the tumult of Jamaican life. Emerging form the story are the hilariously drawn characters, contrasts between the Jamaican and the American outlook, and the lessons about the perils of superimposing a foreign ideology onto a native culture.

It was the foul play that caused the annihilation of Fish, when the Devil was shot in the thick of a wrestling match. And there was only one way for the referee to put things right - with another murder. Death stalks the pages in this darkly comical and occasionally tragic collection of stories, which is set partly in Jamaica, partly amongst the Jamaican diaspora of the United States.