Jamaica Kincaid

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.

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 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, 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.

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 rhododron 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.

Jamaica Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River ... inspired, lyrical short storiesReading 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.

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.

The essential coming-of-age novel by Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. 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."

En modig, ærlig og usentimental bok, nesten ubehagelig sår i sin vilje til å blottstille. Jamaica Kincaids bror Devon døde av AIDS den 19. januar 1996, i en alder av trettitre år. Kincaids poetiske og ofte sjokkerende ærlige gjengivelse av brorens liv og død, er også en historie om hennes familie på øya Antigua. En famille der den ruvende og til tider truende skikkelsen av forfatterens mor, står i sentrum. Broren min er en uforskjønnet skildring av et liv som endte for tidlig, og den forteller mye om de vanskelige sannhetene som finnes i hjertet av alle familier.«Til syvende og sist er det dette memoaren handler om: kløften mellom den personen vi kunne ha vært, og den vi på en eller annen måte, ofte uforklarlig, har blitt. Den handler om å dra, om å etterlate mennesker, om å være en fremmed i sitt eget hjem, for sin egen familie. (…) Denne rike, komplekse boken er memoarene til en flyktning som aldri har vært i stand til å glemme hvor hun kom fra.» Anna Quindlen, New York Times Book Review«Enkelt sagt: forfattere ønsker seg perfekte lesere, men lesere ønsker seg enda mer perfekte forfattere – og finner dem sjelden. Med denne memoaren, er Jamaica Kincaid så nær perfekt som det er mulig å komme.» Carolyn See, The Washington Post

Annie John er en fortelling om en ung jentes oppvekst på den karibiske øya Antigua. Det er egentlig en klassisk oppvekstroman som viser frem den universelle erfaringen og både det tragiske og ofte komiske, i overgangen fra barn til voksen. Som eneste elsket datter har Annie inntil nylig levd et idyllisk liv. Hun er uadskillelig fra sin vakre mor, som med sitt sterke nærvær er selve midtpunktet i den lille jentas liv. Elsket og verdsatt vokser Annie og blomstrer i skyggen av sin mors godhet. Når hun ser tilbake på barndommen, reflekterer hun: «I dette paradiset var det jeg levde.» Men da hun fyller tolv år, endres Annies liv på måter som ofte forblir mystiske for henne selv. Hun begynner å stille spørsmål ved de kulturelle forutsetningene i sin øyverden, på skolen gjør hun instinktivt opprør mot autoriteter, og det skremmende er at moren, som nå ser på Annie som en «ung dame», slutter å være kilde til ubetinget kjærlighet og tar på seg den nye og ukjente rollen som motstander. Ved slutten av skolegangen bestemmer Annie seg for å forlate Antigua og familien sin, men ikke uten en viss sorg, spesielt for moren hun en gang kjente og aldri slutter å sørge over.