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A unique collaboration from two of America's leading artists that explores the fascinating and hidden history of the plant world.
In this witty, deeply original book, the renowned novelist Jamaica Kincaid offers an ABC of the plants that define our world and reveals the often brutal history behind them. Kara Walker, one of America's greatest visual artists, illustrates each entry with provocative, brilliant, enthralling, many-layered watercolors. There has never been a book like An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children--so inventive, surprising, and telling about what our gardens reveal.
A portrait of an indelible young woman, Kincaid's second novel is vivid, true and necessary (Los Angeles Times).
Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. Lewis and Mariah are a thrice-blessed couple--handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Yet, almost at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade. With mingled anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the assumptions and verities of her employers' world and compares them with the vivid realities of her native place. Lucy has no illusions about her own past, but neither is she prepared to be deceived about where she presently is.
Kincaid gathers a sparkling selection of new and beloved poetry and prose about each author's favorite flora.
The passion for gardening and the passion for words come together in this inspired anthology, a collection of essays and poems on topics as diverse as beans and roses, by writers who garden and gardeners who write. Among the contributors are Daniel Hinkley on hellebores; Marina Warner, who remembers the Guinée rose; and Henri Cole, with the poems Bearded Irises and Peonies. Ian Frazier pulls weeds in Memories of a Press-Gang Gardener, and Michael Pollan defends a gothic cousin of the sunflower in Consider the Castor Bean; Ken Druse stalks the sexy jack-in-the-pulpit, and Elaine Scarry contemplates steep slopes of columbine. Most of the pieces are new, but Colette, Katharine S. White, William Carlos Williams, and several other old favorites also make appearances. Jamaica Kincaid, the much admired writer and a passionate gardener herself, has assembled this diverse crew and provides a spirited introduction. A wonderful gift for green thumbs, My Favorite Plant is a happy collection of fresh takes on old friends.
The essential, urgent coming-of-age novel by Jamaica Kincaid, a reinventor of the form.
Since her first, prizewinning collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid's work has been met with nothing short of amazement. The New York Times hailed her prophetic power and the Los Angeles Times Book Review said, No one else seems to be writing quite this way.
In this travel memoir, the acclaimed novelist Jamaica Kincaid chronicles a three-week trek through Nepal, the spectacular and exotic Himalayan land, where she and her companions are gathering seeds for planting at home. The natural world and, in particular, plants and gardening are central to Kincaid's work; in addition to such novels as Annie John and Lucy, Kincaid is the author of My Garden (Book): a collection of essays about her love of cultivating plants and gardens throughout her life. Among Flowers intertwines meditations on nature and stunning descriptions of the Himalayan landscape with observations on the ironies, difficulties, and dangers of this magnificent journey.
For Kincaid and three botanist friends, Nepal is a paradise, a place where a single day's hike can traverse climate zones, from subtropical to alpine, encompassing flora suitable for growing at their homes, from Wales to Vermont. Yet as she makes clear, there is far more to this foreign world than rhododendrons that grow thirty feet high. Danger, too, is a constant companion--and the leeches are the least of the worries. Unpredictable Maoist guerillas live in these perilous mountains, and when they do appear--as they do more than once--their enigmatic presence lingers long after they have melted back into the landscape. And Kincaid, who writes of the looming, lasting effects of colonialism in her works, necessarily explores the irony of her status as memsahib with Sherpas and bearers. A wonderful blend of introspective insight and beautifully rendered description, Among Flowers is a vivid, engrossing, and characteristically frank memoir from one of our most striking voices.
Jamaica Kincaid invites us into her garden in this irresistible stream of horticultural consciousness (Michael Pollan).
Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a square plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced gardener friends, she planted only seeds of flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book): , she gathers all that she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it in the same spirit: 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 and dreams of ways to trap small plant-eating animals. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where she grew up and where one of her favorite school subjects was botany, and she considers the implications of the English idea of the garden in colonized countries. On a trip to the Chelsea Flower Show, she visits historic English gardens on English soil. My Garden (Book): is an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the gardeners who tend them.
A brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua, by the author of Annie John.
Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright, A Small Place magnifies our vision of one small place with Swiftian wit and precision. Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay candidly appraises the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up, Antigua, and makes palpable the impact of European colonialism and tourism.
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.
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 prose. This novel tells 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 fear of her father, her desperate loneliness, and her deep sympathy for those who share her history. But underlying all is the black room of the world that is Xuela's motherlessness and barrenness.
Finalist for the 1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction
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.
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.
A startlingly beautiful novel about marriage by one of our most scouringly vivid writers (The New York Times Book Review).
In See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid's brilliant and evocative novel, 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.
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.
The revelatory (The New York Review of Books) story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home.
Jamaica Kincaid's first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate chauffeur who makes his living along the wide, open roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air. As Mr. Potter's narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, damaged community. Amid his surroundings, he struggles to live at ease: 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.
Jamaica Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River ... inspired, lyrical short stories
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 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.
The garden as laboratory for our Anthropocene future, from Derek Jarman to Piet Oudolf, urban farming to vertical gardens
Gardens have always been places of leisure, pleasure and production; they reflect identities, dreams and visions. Deeply rooted in their culture, gardens have immense symbolic potential. The recent revival of horticulture has focused less on the garden as a romantic refuge than as a place where we might imagine the future and develop solutions. Urban farms, vertical gardens and other innovative projects in art, architecture and urban planning demonstrate that the present return to the garden is no timid retreat, but a pioneering quest for a world in which social and ecological justice count for something.
Garden Futures examines what gardens and their design reveal about our relationship to nature. In exploring the history of ideas behind the genesis of the modern garden, the book takes a close look at the present, goes in search of origins in the past and builds bridges into the future. Stunning photographs illustrate groundbreaking gardens by such designers as Derek Jarman and Piet Oudolf, while critical articles by well-known authors question conventional garden ideals--from perfect lawns to the ubiquitous garden plants and their colonial roots. Historical photo-essays consider the garden as a political space; authors and gardeners including Gilles Clement and Jamaica Kincaid present the garden as a place of learning where abstract concepts like ecology, climate change and food insecurity are translated into things you can smell, touch and taste. Daisy Ginsberg, Salmon Creek Farm and EcoLogic Studio create experimental and speculative projects generating new attitudes and approaches. In the age of the Anthropocene, the entire planet emerges as a garden that we need to cultivate, tend and use responsibly.
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.
A collection of the inimitable writer's essays, from her early days at The Village Voice through her time at The New Yorker.
This collection of Jamaica Kincaid's nonfiction writings, from her early days at The New Yorker until now, amounts to a brilliant, hilarious, trenchant self-portrait of one of the most surprising and original writers we have. From the classic Autobiography of a Dress to her original thinking about the meaning of the garden, Kincaid writes about the world as she finds it, with her own quizzical, rapier-sharp response to reality that always takes the reader in new, life-enhancing directions. Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in Antigua in 1949. She has always been herself. Putting Myself Together shows how this inimitable self-created mind and spirit, endowed with inimitable wit, humor, and fearlessness, has become one of our essential writers.
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.
From The Talk of the Town, Jamaica Kincaid's first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York
Talk Pieces 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 came to the United States from Antigua, from 1978 to 1983. Kincaid found a unique voice, at once in sync with William Shawn's tone for the quintessential elite insider's magazine, and (though unsigned) all her own--wonderingly alive to the ironies and screwball details that characterized her adopted city. New York is a town that, in return, fast adopts those who embrace it, and in these early pieces Kincaid discovers many of its hilarious secrets and urban mannerisms. She meets Miss Jamaica, visiting from Kingston, and escorts the reader to the West Indian-American Day parade in Brooklyn; she sees Ed Koch don his Cheshire-cat smile and watches Tammy Wynette autograph a copy of Lattimore's Odyssey; she learns the worlds of publishing and partying, of fashion and popular music, and how to call a cauliflower a crudite. The book also records 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.