![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Showing 1 - 25 of 25 matches in All Departments
Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador Books In this acclaimed travel memoir Jamaica Kincaid chronicles a spectacular and exotic three-week trek through the Himalayan land of Nepal, 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. 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 their worries. Unpredictable Maoist guerrillas 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 the most striking voices in contemporary literature. Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best in modern literature.
The visionary masterpiece, tracing a riverboat crew's dreamlike jungle voyage ... 'My new all time favourite book ... A magnificent, breathtaking and terrifying novel.' Tsitsi Dangarembga 'An exhilarating experience ... Makes visions real and reality visions ... Genius.' Jamaica Kincaid 'A masterpiece: I love this book for its language, adventure and wisdoms.' Monique Roffey 'Revel in the inviolate, ever-deepening mystery of Wilson Harris's work.' Jeet Thayil 'The Guyanese William Blake . Such poetic intensity.' Angela Carter I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ... A crew of men are embarking on a voyage up a turbulent river through the rainforests of Guyana. Their domineering leader, Donne, is the spirit of a conquistador, obsessed with hunting for a mysterious woman and exploiting indigenous people as plantation labour. But their expedition is plagued by tragedies, haunted by drowned ghosts: spectres of the crew themselves, inhabiting a blurred shadowland between life and death. As their journey into the interior - their own hearts of darkness - deepens, it assumes a spiritual dimension, guiding them towards a new destination: the Palace of the Peacock ... A modernist fever dream; prose poem; modern myth; elegy to victims of colonial conquest: Wilson Harris' masterpiece has defied definition for over sixty years, and is reissued for a new generation of readers. 'One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating.' Guardian 'Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.' Observer 'Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.' The Times 'The most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking Caribbean.' Fred D'Aguiar 'Extraordinary ... Courageous and visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues.' Pauline Melville
Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador Books Xuela Claudette Richardson is recalling the last seventy years of her life, and so she must begin with her birth, and the accompanying death of her mother. Xuela's vivid, visceral recollections of the lonely, unsettled life that follows the trauma of her arrival include that of her distant father, who sends her away to another household at the earliest opportunity; of her passion for the stevedore Roland, who fulfils her sexually but not intellectually; and of her husband, who provides her with status and a wealthy lifestyle but whom she is incapable of loving. Poetic and disturbing, The Autobiography of My Mother is one of Kincaid's most powerful statements of Afro-Caribbean women's struggle for identity and independence, against a hostile backdrop of sexism and colonialism. Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.
At the Bottom of the River is Jamaica Kincaid's first published work, a selection of inter-connected prose poems told from the perspective of a young Afro-Caribbean girl. Collecting pieces written for the New Yorker and the Paris Review between 1978 and 1982, including the seminal 'Girl', these stunning works announced a fully-formed, generational talent and firmly established the themes that Kincaid would continue to return to in her later work: the loss of childhood, the fractious nature of mother-daughter relationships, the intangible beauty of the natural world, and the striving for independence in a colonial landscape. Powerful and lyrical, this is an unforgettable collection from a unique and necessary literary voice. Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.
An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived a peaceful and content life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful and influential presence, who sits at the very centre of the little girl's existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother's shadow. 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 makes rebellious friends and frequently challenges 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. A haunting and tragicomic tale of the end of childhood, Annie John is told with Jamaica Kincaid's trademark candour and complexity, and is a true coming-of-age classic.
Jamaica Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother Devon Drew's life is also the story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. Kincaid's unblinking record of a life that ed too early speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.
Antigua--a ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies and the author's birthplace--is the setting of a lyrical, sardonic, and forthright essay that offers an insider's eye-opening view of the lives and ways of her people.
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. At first glance Lewis and Mariah are a blessed couple - handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Almost at once, however, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade. With a mixture of anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the privileged, facile world of her employers while comparing it to the vivid realities of her home in the Caribbean. Lucy has no illusions about her own past, but neither is she prepared to be deceived about where she presently is. In this environment a new person unfolds: passionate, sexually forthright, and disarmingly honest. In Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid has created a startling new character: a captivating heroine possessed with clear-sightedness and ferocious integrity. Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.
A brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua--by the author of Annie John
A major new translation of a stunning rediscovered novel by Alexandre Dumas, Georges is a classic swashbuckling adventure. Brilliantly translated by Tina A. Kover in lively, fluid prose, this is Dumas's most daring work, in which his themes of intrigue and romance are illuminated by the issues of racial prejudice and the profound quest for identity. Georges Munier is a sensitive boy growing up in the nineteenth century on the island of Mauritius. The son of a wealthy mulatto, Pierre Munier, Georges regularly sees how his father's courage is tempered by a sense of inferiority before whites-and Georges vows that he will be different. When Georges matures into a man committed to moral superiority mixed with physical strength, the stage is set for a conflict with the island's rich and powerful plantation owner, Monsieur de Malmedie, and a forbidden romance with Sara, the beautiful woman engaged to Malmedie's son. Swordplay, a slave rebellion, a harrowing escape, and a vow of vengeance-Georges is unmistakably the work of the master who wrote The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Yet it stands apart as the only book Dumas ever wrote that confronts the subject of race-a potent topic, since Dumas was of African ancestry himself. This edition also features a captivating Introduction by Jamaica Kincaid and an eloquent Afterword and Notes by Werner Sollors, who addresses key themes such as colonialism, racism, African slavery, and interracial intimacy. Long out of print in America, Georges can now be appreciated as never before and added to the greatest works of this immortal author. From the Hardcover edition.
In the early 1970s, the writer Ian Frazier left a small town in Ohio to move to a loft in lower Manhattan. Gone to New York is Frazier's account of the city over the thirty years, a book as full of vitality and charm as the city it describes. It features street scenes from every corner of the metropolis, where every block is an event and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet the man who climbed the World Trade Center, learn the location of Manhattan's antipodes, and follow Frazier down Canal Street in the mid-1970s, to Brooklyn in the 1980s and aboard the F Train in the twenty-first century. Like his literary forebears Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, Frazier makes us fall in love with America's greatest city all over again - just the way he did.
A Modern Library Paperback Original
"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.
A stunning new collection of short stories about motherhood, selected and introduced by Candice Brathwaite. ______________ 'To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colours of a rainbow' MAYA ANGELOU The story of motherhood is an endlessly rich one: it's one of love - and all the highs and lows that come with that world-turning emotion - and, in the purest sense, of life itself. Within these pages, some of the finest writers in the world explore motherhood in wildly varying modes, from single parenthood to sisters coparenting, from the deepest hardships to the biggest celebrations. Selected and introduced by Candice Brathwaite, author of I Am Not Your Baby Mother. Stories by Lydia Davis, Anita Desai, Mary Gaitskill, Tessa Hadley, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Irenosen Okojie, Casey Plett, Tabitha Siklos, Helen Simpson, Ali Smith
Jamaica Kincaid's inspired, lyrical short stories
The coming-of-age story of one of Jamaica Kincaid's most admired creations--newly available in paperback
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.
Welcome to Ian Frazier's New York, where every block is an event, and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet landlord extraordinaire Zvi Hugo Segal, and the man who scaled the World Trade Center. Learn the location of Manhattan's antipodes, and meander the length of Route 3 to New Jersey. Like his literary forebears Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, Frazier makes us fall in love with America's greatest city all over again.
The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for
the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each
volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of
periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field,
then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This
unique system has made the Best American series the most
respected--and most popular--of its kind.
From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an
unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age
|
![]() ![]() You may like...
A Manual of Spherical and Practical…
William Chauvenet
Paperback
Simpson's Forensic Medicine
Jason Payne-James, Richard Martin Jones
Paperback
Dance Of The Dung Beetles - Their Role…
Marcus Byrne, Helen Lunn
Paperback
|