Now in its first American edition, Dionne Brand's groundbreaking A Map to the Door of No Return has emerged as a modern classic, a highly influential exploration of "being" in the Black Diaspora.

Since its first publication in 2001, Dionne Brand's groundbreaking exploration of being in the Black Diaspora, A Map to the Door of No Return, has emerged as a modern classic. The door, in Brand's iconic schema, represents the point of rupture where the ancestors of the Black Diaspora departed one world for another: the place where all names were forgotten, and all beginnings recast. "This door," writes Brand, "is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location . . . Since leaving was never voluntary, return was, and still may be, an intention, however deeply buried. There is as it says no way in; no return."

Through shards of history, memoir, lyrical investigation, and the unwritten experience of so many descendants of those who passed through the door, Brand constructs a map of this indelible region, culminating in an enduring expression, both definitive and seeking, of what it is to live, think, and create in the wake of colonization.

With a new preface by the author, and an afterword by Saidiya Hartman.

One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024. Winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries―tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.

With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light―in order to survive, and in order to live.

This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.

From the award-winning novelist and poet Dionne Brand, a smart, sensual, and witty novel about what happens when love and intellect are set on a collision course.

Theory begins as its narrator sets out, like many a graduate student, to write a wildly ambitious thesis on the past, present, and future of art, culture, race, gender, class, and politics―a revolutionary work that its author believes will synthesize and thereby transform the world.

While our narrator tries to complete this magnum opus, three lovers enter the story, one after the other, each transforming the endeavor: first there is beautiful and sensual Selah, who scoffs at the narrator’s constant tinkering with academic abstractions; then altruistic and passionate Yara, who rescues every lost soul who crosses her path; and finally spiritual occultist Odalys, who values magic and superstition over the heady intellectual and cultural circles the narrator aspires to inhabit. Each galvanizing love affair (representing, in turn, the heart, the head, and the spirit) upends and reorients the narrator’s life and, inevitably, requires an overhaul of the ever larger and more unwieldy dissertation, with results both humorous and poignant.

By effortlessly telling this short, intense tale in the voice of an unnamed, ungendered (and brilliantly unreliable) narrator, Dionne Brand makes a bold statement not only about love and personhood, but about race and gender―and what can and cannot be articulated in prose when the forces that inhabit the space between words are greater than words themselves.

Theory is a gorgeous, profoundly moving, word- and note-perfect novel of ideas that only a great artist at the height of her powers could write.

A globe-spanning jigsaw puzzle of a novel about what it is to be human during this nervous, catastrophic moment in time.

Dionne Brand’s brief, powerful small life has the dazzling, hypnotic rhythm of a series of waves, tossing together multiple narrators and stories in time and space. The novel works through affective momentum, through gathering velocity, through multiplying and quickening voices and stories. None of these vividly alive characters know one another, but all exist inside this nervous moment in time.

Throughout the novel, characters’ voices recur in random ways, each around their own “small life.” Each person is in the middle of an action or a demand or a situation or a misunderstanding, and each is attempting to find a life, to know a life, to navigate the precarity of life. These lives are unfolding anywhere in the world: leaving the outskirts of Cartagena, working the streets of Madrid, caught in a toxic flood, hanging on to the edge of a boat in the Mediterranean, cleaning a stall in a North American airport, setting off to work on an oil platform, refusing eviction from an apartment. Their stories build and braid through inference, familiarity, and emotion―shock, realization, small joy―offering glimpses of the innermost workings of human beings in our contemporary, catastrophic zeitgeist.

An eloquent and original exploration of the Atlantic slave trade―now featuring the essay “Venus in Two Acts” and a new introduction by Dionne Brand.

A monumental work of first-person history, Lose Your Mother traces the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey Saidiya Hartman took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and the rippling effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African-American history.

The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger―torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to be uprooted from your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. There are no known survivors of Hartman’s lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping to find. Instead, she is a stranger in search of strangers, forging connections with others living in the wake of atrocity.

A rigorous and intimate reflection on the afterlife of slavery, Lose Your Mother is both a book of history and a book of grief. This 20th anniversary edition now includes Hartman’s landmark essay “Venus in Two Acts” and a new introduction by Dionne Brand―perfect for introducing new readers to Hartman’s lived-in way of contending with the past.

Mara Brock Akil, the award-winning creator of Girlfriends, Being Mary Jane, Love Is, and Forever, pens an emotionally enthralling debut novel about enduring love, world-shattering secrets, and self-awakening.

What happens when one knock at your door sends your entire world into chaos? When a stranger becomes a lifeline? When the reality you’ve meticulously curated seems to be a mirage?

From the outside looking in, one might say that Dionne Daphne had it all: being the beauty editor at a prestigious New York magazine, a boyfriend who could have been plucked out of its model pages, the social life of the upper echelon, and a girlhood steeped in debutant balls.

But that is from the outside. When the now ex-boyfriend arrives at her Brooklyn doorstep Dionne imagines reconciliation, going back to the good life brimming with the possibility of marriage; the life her mother always wanted for her. Instead, he delivers life-threatening news that creates a crack in her picture-perfect world. A crack that grows legs and runs her right into her past, unearthing a secret that she has hidden since childhood.

In an effort to run toward the truth and away from a lie, Dionne sets out on a spur-of-the-moment road trip with an unlikely stranger to confront the long-buried darkness of her past and the family who made it so. As Dionne comes to a final reckoning, she begins to unravel new layers of herself and fresh possibilities for her life, her family, and even her love.

The Revelation of Dionne Daphne is at once a deeply moving and provocatively gripping novel that shows when you dig deep enough into the shadows of your life, light can be revealed. It’s a novel of broken lovers, a fractured family, and distant friendships all making their way back to one another.

Stories from Blue Latitudes gathers the major and emerging women fiction writers from the Caribbean, including Dionne Brand, Michelle Cliff, Merle Collins, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, and Pauline Melville. 

Similar themes grace their stories of life at home and abroad. In some, the sexual exploitation of Caribbean girls and women becomes a metaphor for neocolonialism, a biting rejoinder to enticing travel brochures that depict the Caribbean as a tropical playground and encourage Americans to "make it your own." Other tales deal with the sad legacy of colonial history and the ways in which race, skin color, and class complicate relationships between men and women, parents and children. 

But whether writing about childhood or adulthood, life in the islands or life abroad, the writers express their particular concerns with a passion that comes from lived experience, and with a love of place and a feminist sensibility that are accessible to new readers of Caribbean literature as well as to an academic audience. "What matters is how well we have told our tale, how well we have drawn pictures of the people and places we write about, " Nunez says. And indeed, this anthology makes those pictures come alive.

A poignant and ruthlessly honest journey through cultural expectations of size, race, and gender—and toward a brighter future—from National Book Award nominee Evette Dionne

My body has not betrayed me; it has continued rebounding against all odds. It is a body that others map their expectations on, but it has never let me down.

In this insightful, funny, and whip-smart book, acclaimed writer Evette Dionne explores the minefields fat Black woman are forced to navigate in the course of everyday life. From her early experiences of harassment to adolescent self-discovery in internet chatrooms to diagnosis with heart failure at age twenty-nine, Dionne tracks her relationships with friendship, sex, motherhood, agoraphobia, health, pop culture, and self-image.

Along the way, she lifts back the curtain to reveal the subtle, insidious forms of surveillance and control levied at fat women: At the doctor’s office, where any health ailment is treated with a directive to lose weight. On dating sites, where larger bodies are rejected or fetishized. On TV, where fat characters are asexual comedic relief. But Dionne’s unflinching account of our deeply held prejudices is matched by her fierce belief in the power of self-love.

An unmissable portrait of a woman on a journey toward understanding our society and herself, Weightless holds up a mirror to the world we live in and asks us to imagine the future we deserve.

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Artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen continues his exploration of colonial history and its legacies in this new book comprised of meditative photographs of Grenada’s flora. Taken on a trip to the island in the summer of 2024, these images reckon with the connections between landscape and historical trauma, studying Grenada’s plant life as permanent markers of beauty in a land ravaged by exploitation. Rendered in vivid colour, the images reflect the complex interlocking of history, heritage, and survival contained in the simplicity of the island flora. Taking as his touchpoint the late Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s elegy to his mother, ‘The Bounty’, McQueen’s project adopts a similarly poetic sensibility, attuned to the resilience of the island’s landscape and the dualities of the word ‘bounty’, which alludes to both the generosity of nature and the sum paid to slave catchers. Grounded in a deep reverence for the sublime natural world, Bounty invites a visceral engagement with the silent endurance of nature despite the grim realities of human history.