The Best of Gowanus II: More New Writing from Africa, Asia & the Caribbean

Anthology of third world writers. Second volume in a series starting with The Best of Gowanus: New Writing from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean (pub. 2001; reviewed in Publishers Weekly, ForeWord, Midwest Book review et al.). Contains well-established and new authors, fiction and non-fiction. Introduction by Kenneth Ramchand, noted professor of literature at University of the West Indies and Colgate University.

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A Hammock Beneath the Mangoes: Stories from Latin America (Plume Fiction)

This splendid collection of stories by 26 Latin American authors features the new voices and celebrated masters of one of the world's foremost literatures. Included are Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Juan Carlos Onetti, Manuel Puig, and others. Organized geographically.

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Walk Good: Travels to Negril, Jamaica

'Walk Good' is an adventure travel story chronicling the experiences of the author in Negril, Jamaica. It's an escape to the sunny beaches, the seas and the mountain back roads of the island. The culture of the island, including the food, the music, a smattering of history and the character of the people form the backdrop of the story.

Walk Good, a Jamaican colloquialism, means 'have a safe and comfortable trip'. Come on along!

Ride the bus on the infamous long and bumpy road from Montego Bay to Negril. Take in the sights, sounds and smells along the way, enjoy the rustic beauty of the roadside villages. Lassive, our driver, deftly directs our bus around the myriad obstacles that are common to Jamaican roads; cows, goats, potholes, big ladies with baskets on their heads and oncoming traffic in our lane. A large boulder careens down an incline from a construction site, just missing the bus, one of the passengers rolls a ganja spliff and passes it around.

On the beach in Negril we talk to an old minstrel who sings a Bob Marley tune during a glorious Caribbean sunset. We laugh with the vendors who work on the beach, including one tall thin cigarette vendor who looks like The Cat in the Hat (Cigarrrreeeeeettts!). In a small I craft stall we come face to face with Reddie Freddie, a wooden carving common in Jamaica that features a little man with colossal erect penis and a big smile pasted across his woody face. A bartender in a run-down shack of a bar introduces us to a local drink called Joncrobatty, which literally translated means 'Buzzard's Ass'. The drink lives up to its name. Observe the hilarious stumblings of the debauched neighbors, we call them 'The Jerks', that share the room next door. Relax on a sunset cruise on 'Wild Thing', a party boat where a couple of tourist girls have a bit too much from the open bar and do an impromptu strip show. Pose live on the World Wide Web (the camera is mounted on a coconut tree on the beach), taunt work colleagues, tuned in via their desktop computers back in the frozen Canadian tundra. Leslie, one of the chambermaids at the hotel is startled when she finds something unexpected in the bed ("I t'ought it was a dead mon!"). Experience Negril's night scene, complete with beach bonfires, flares out over the water, live reggae music and an incredible canopy of starts above.

Are you up for a wedding on the beach? Join friends and family at the resort where they help my fiancée and I tie the knot. My daughters spot their first real Rastaman, complete with long dreadlocks and carrying a large ganja bud. The wedding is on the beach just before sunset in an idyllic setting, we dine in the slanting rays of the setting sun beneath the thatched canopy of a seaside restaurant. Our honeymoon is at the notorious Hedonism resort in Negril. It's a no-holds-barred, full-tilt adult fantasyland, complete with toga parties, nude hot tubs, wet T-shirt contests and ... well, you'll have to read the book. Take a trip to the north shore of Jamaica, where we arrive after a crazy ride with a wild-man cab driver. Attend a mass nude wedding on the beach on Valentines Day, complete with the media, helicopters overhead and placard carrying protesters. Make the pilgrimage up into the hills to visit the spiritual sanctuary where Bob Marley, Jamaica's legendary reggae music! star, lays. On the way take in the sights in the pastoral rolling countryside. Back at the seaside go for a scuba dive in the crystalline waters of Runaway Bay. Trek up the highway to the famous Dunns River Falls, join in a human-chain and climb the cool cascading waterfalls.

Return to Negril, our little slice of paradise. Feast on a steaming mound of spicy jerk chicken, do battle with a large and Herculean centipede (called 'forty legs' by Jamaicans) that lurks in the bathroom. Encounter a pack of beach dogs, dodge the aloe gel ladies on the beach, who try to rub you down with aloe gel and then charge you after-the-fact. Talk to an old fisherman friend (a Hemingway-esque Santiago) as you peruse his collection of shells and things from the sea. Jump off a 35-foot cliff into the sparkling emerald waters at The Pickled Parrot, a sunset café.

Each chapter of 'Walk Good' is introduced with a Jamaican proverb. There is also an appendix of Jamaican Proverbs, which are pointed and humorous little gems of wisdom that are steeped in the local culture but apply equally as well to Western society.

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Dust on Her Tongue

fiction, Guatemala, tr Paul Bowles

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Cubanisimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature

¡Cubanísimo! is the first book to gather Cuban stories, essays, poems and novel excerpts in one volume that summarizes the richness and depth of a great national literature. From the turn of the century to the present, from Havana to Miami, New York, Mexico City, Madrid and beyond, the spirit and diversity of Cuban cultureconverge in one vibrant literary jam session. Cristina García has ingeniously grouped her selections according to “the music of their sentences” into five sections named for Cuban dance styles.

¡Cubanísimo! begins with an elegant classical danzón section that includes poems and diaries from the father of Cuban literature, José Martí, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s hallucinatory story A View from the Mangrove. As it moves to more contemporary dances, the book offers, among other delights, the essay by Alejo Carpentier that was the first to define magical realism; the scandalously sensual eighth chapter from José Lezama Lima’s controversial 1966 novel Paradiso; Ana Menendez’s Little Havana-inspired story, In Cuba I was a German Shepherd; a passage from Reinaldo Arenas’s acclaimed memoir Before Night Falls and six witty musings—or mambos—on language from Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Life on the Hyphen.

A brilliant introduction for readers who want to explore Cuban literature, as well as a collectible volume for those who love Cuba, ¡Cubanísimo! is a celebration of Cuban culture, from the island to its farthest flung voices.

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Dancing in the Dark

A searing new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragic, little-known life of Bert Williams (1874—1922), the first black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune.

Even as an eleven-year-old child living in Southern California in the late 1800s–his family had recently emigrated from the Bahamas–Bert Williams understood that he had to “learn the role that America had set aside for him.” At the age of twenty-two, after years of struggling for success on the stage, he made the radical decision to do his own “impersonation of a negro”: he donned blackface makeup and played the “coon” as a character. Behind this mask, he became a Broadway headliner, starring in the Ziegfeld Follies for eight years and leading his own musical theater company–as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields.
Williams was a man of great intelligence, elegance, and dignity, but the barriers he broke down onstage continued to bear heavily on his personal life, and the contradictions between the man he was and the character he played were increasingly irreconcilable for him. W. C. Fields called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew,” and it is this dichotomy at Williams’s core that Caryl Phillips illuminates in a richly nuanced, brilliantly written narrative.

The story of a single life, Dancing in the Dark is also a novel about the tragedies of race and identity, and the perils of self-invention, that have long plagued American culture. Powerfully emotional and moving, it is Caryl Phillips’s most accomplished novel yet.


From the Hardcover edition.

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The Orchid House

Lally helps to raise three white sisters in the Orchid House on the Island of Dominica and observes as each flees to the cold northern lands of England and America only to return to their magical past and the man they love. (General Fiction).

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Lost Girls: A Sherry Moore Novel

George D. Shuman returns! In his eagerly anticipated new thriller, blind psychic Sherry Moore combs the Caribbean to find the murderous kingpin of a human trafficking network and finds that she must confront a man who shares her talent for seeing the final moments of a dead body's life.

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A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Tales from Margaritaville (stories) and Where Is Joe Merchant? (a mystery) secured songwriter Jimmy Buffett's niche reputation as an affable, poetic beach bum. A Pirate Looks at Fifty, a travel-diary-cum-autobiography, features Buffett behind the wheel of his Grumman Albatross seaplane, safely piloting family and friends through a three-week trip around South and Central America and the Caribbean. He blends gentle scenic narration with rambling, unplugged life stories meant to convey that he's made peace with the whole aging process. For Buffett, turning 50 "can be a ball of snakes that conjures up immediate thoughts of mortality and accountability. (`What have I done with my life?') Or, it can be a great excuse to reward yourself for just getting there. (`He who dies with the most toys wins.') I instinctively chose door number two."

On this tack, Buffett plans an opulent, laid-back trip for his brood and goes into so many details about his favorite possessions (three pages on knapsacks!) that the cheerful vagabond in flip-flops is nearly eclipsed by the rich, domesticated businessman/dad he's become. In addition, stinging losses and limitations--his dad's Alzheimer's disease, his own terrifying solo plane crash in 1996--creep into his cozy yarns. Yet Buffett's infectious, grinning attitude towards life eventually finds resurrection in extended riffs on fly-fishing, solo piloting over water, and surfing. In such passages, he earns his claim to a "saline psyche," a legacy inherited from his grandfather, skipper of a five-masted barkentine that ferried lumber from New Orleans to the Caribbean. Sailing and soaring over Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific seas, Buffett looks at 50 and sees a very good life.

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Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction

Med Sz PB

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