Putting myself together Writing 1974-

Jamaica Kincaid

Book - 2025

"A collection of the inimitable writer's essays, stories, and articles from her early days at The Village Voice through her time at The New Yorker "-- Provided by publisher.

Saved in:
1 being processed

2nd Floor New Shelf Show me where

814.54/Kincaid
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor New Shelf 814.54/Kincaid (NEW SHELF) Checked In
Subjects
Genres
Essays
Literary criticism
Literature
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Jamaica Kincaid (author)
Other Authors
Henry Louis Gates (writer of introduction)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xviii, 315 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780374613235
  • Introduction
  • The Triumph of Bad and Cool (1974)
  • Erotica! (1975)
  • If Mammies Ruled the World (1975)
  • Pam Grier (1975)
  • The Labelle Hustle (1975)
  • Last of the Black White Girls (1976)
  • Jamaica Kincaid's New York (1977)
  • Antigua Crossings (Fiction) (1978)
  • Ovando (Fiction) (1989)
  • Athol Fugard (Interview by Jamaica Kincaid) (1990)
  • The Finishing Line (Fiction) (1990)
  • Foreword to Babouk: Voices of Resistance (1991)
  • On Seeing England for the First Time (1991)
  • Biography of a Dress (1992)
  • An Antiguan Election Journal (1994)
  • Christmas Pictures from a Warm Climate (1994)
  • Introduction to The Best American Essays, 1995
  • The Little Revenge from the Periphery (1997)
  • Introduction to Generations of Women (1998)
  • Introduction to My Favorite Plant (1998)
  • Introduction to Poetics of Place (1998)
  • Looking at Giverny (1998)
  • Those Words That Echo… Echo… Echo Through Life (1999)
  • Islander Once, Now a Voyager (2000)
  • Sowers and Reapers (2001)
  • Her Best Friend Provokes Her to Write About Her Garden (2002)
  • Splendor in the Glass (2002)
  • The Garden the Year Just Passed (2002)
  • The Lure of the Poppy (2002)
  • Gardening (2003)
  • Living History in Vermont (2003)
  • Desert Blooms (2004)
  • Jumby Bay (2004)
  • Introduction to The Best American Travel Writing, 2005
  • Formal Meets Folly (2005)
  • Foreword to Ian Frazier's Gone to New York (2006)
  • Captain's Farm (2006)
  • Foreword to Alexandre Dumas's Georges (2007)
  • Dances with Daffodils (2007)
  • Her Infinite Variety (2008)
  • The Estrangement (2009)
  • Lack, Part Two (2009)
  • Tide (2011)
  • Introduction to Simone Schwarz-Bart's The Bridge of Beyond (2013)
  • The Kind of Gardener I Am Not (2018)
  • The Walk to Robert Frost's House (2019)
  • A Letter to Robinson Crusoe (2019)
  • I See the World (2020)
  • Inside the American Snow Dome (2020)
  • I was never really making a garden so much as having a conversation (2020)
  • The Disturbances of the Garden (2020)
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist Kincaid (See Now Then) artfully touches on nature, womanhood, race, and identity in this stunning collection. In several essays, she pays tribute to her Antiguan American heritage and the women in her family who shaped her sense of self. For instance, in "Antigua Crossings," Kincaid draws an analogy between the unpredictable, inviting, dangerous, and beautiful Carribean Sea and how she felt at age 12 about "all the women" in her family. In "Biography of a Dress," she reflects on the lengths her mother went to in order to provide for her family despite economic restrictions and racial disparities, remembering a prevailing look of exhaustion in her mother's face that she, as a child, was too naive to recognize. Elsewhere, Kincaid meditates on The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir ("I will never read it again") and on her garden, a place she loves "very much--not as a refuge from all that is troubling and confounding about that general thing called life, but because all that is troubling about it, all that is confounding about it, is the source for me of multiple pleasures." Kincaid's cutting prose shines, and the collection makes for a marvelous account of the author's life and career. This is a triumph. Agent: Jeff Posternak, Wylie Agency. (Aug.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A writer's sharp opinions. Kincaid gathers more than 50 pieces of nonfiction--essays, introductions, memoir, and an interview with Athol Fugard--from 1973 to 2020, that reveal recurring themes: writing and gardening, friendship and family, and, most prominently, racism and colonialism. In her native Antigua, Kincaid grew up in a "colonial situation" that incited her ongoing "state of rage, rage, and more rage." In school, she was shown a map of England, laid out "gently, beautifully, delicately, a very special jewel" situated "on a bed of sky blue"; the nation, she was made to believe, represented the pinnacle of culture. She read 19th-century English authors who depicted a society nothing like her own: "We understood then--we were meant to understand then--that England was to be our source of myth and the source from which we got our sense of reality, our sense of what was meaningful, our sense of what was meaningless--and much about our own lives and much about the very idea of us headed that last list." It's no wonder that when Kincaid first went to England, she hated it and everything about it. "The reality of my life was conquests, subjugation, humiliation, enforced amnesia," she writes. Many essays reflect on colonial oppression. She can neither forgive nor forget those who treated humans like commodities and drained the wealth of the countries they dominated. "Have you ever wondered," she asks, "why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants?" In a different mood entirely are Kincaid's essays on her friendship with Ian Frazier, her writing for theNew Yorker, her love for her children, and, always, gardening, a source of unequaled joy. Henry Louis Gates Jr. provides an appreciative introduction. A spirited miscellany. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.