‘Fresh, risky, improvisational and hard-to-categorize writing’ - Chicago Tribune Talk Stories is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for the New Yorker's ‘Talk of the Town’ column from 1978 to 1983, when she arrived in the United States from Antigua. New York is a town that fast adopts those who embrace it, and in these early pieces Kincaid discovers its many hidden secrets and urban mannerisms as she learns the worlds of publishing and partying, of fashion and popular music, and how to call a cauliflower a crudite. This is an insightful record of Kincaid's...

‘If revenge is a dish best served cold, See Now Then is a baked alaska in reverse, chilling on the outside, screaming hot at the center’ - New York Times A piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness. 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. Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to...

‘Poetic and affecting’ - Robert Antoni, The Washington Post 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. Ignoring the legacy of his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who took her own life, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease amid his surroundings: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, and...