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A lyrical and poignant coming-of-age story about one girl's immigration experience, as she moves from Haiti to New York City, by award-winning author Edwidge Danticat.

It is election time in Haiti, and bombs are going off in the capital city of Port-au-Prince. During a visit from her home in rural Haiti, Celiane Espérance and her mother are nearly killed. Looking at her country with new eyes, Celiane gains a fresh resolve to be reunited with her father in Brooklyn, New York.

The harsh winter and concrete landscape of her new home are a shock to Celiane, who witnesses her parents' struggle to earn a living and her brother's uneasy adjustment to American society, and at the same time encounters her own challenges with learning and school violence.

National Book Award finalist Edwidge Danticat weaves a beautiful, honest, and timely story of the American immigrant experience in this luminous novel about resilience, hope, and family.

Discover the 20th Anniversary edition of Edwidge Danticat’s unforgettable National Book Award Finalist story collection—complete with a new story.

Arriving one year after the Haitian-American's first novel (Breath, Eyes, Memory) alerted critics to her compelling voice, these 10 stories, some of which have appeared in small literary journals, confirm Danticat's reputation as a remarkably gifted writer.

Examining the lives of ordinary Haitians, particularly those struggling to survive under the brutal Duvalier regime, Danticat illuminates the distance between people's desires and the stifling reality of their lives. A profound mix of Catholicism and voodoo spirituality informs the tales, bestowing a mythic importance on people described in the opening story, "Children of the Sea," as those "in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves." The ceaseless grip of dictatorship often leads men to emotionally abandon their families, like the husband in "A Wall of Fire Rising," who dreams of escaping in a neighbor's hot-air balloon. The women exhibit more resilience, largely because of their insistence on finding meaning and solidarity through storytelling; but Danticat portrays these bonds with an honesty that shows that sisterhood, too, has its power plays. In the book's final piece, "Epilogue: Women Like Us," she writes: "Are there women who both cook and write? Kitchen poets, they call them. They slip phrases into their stew and wrap meaning around their pork before frying it. They make narrative dumplings and stuff their daughter's mouths so they say nothing more."

These stories inform and enrich one another, as the female characters reveal a common ancestry and ties to the fictional Ville Rose. In addition to the power of Danticat's themes, the book is enhanced by an element of suspense—we're never certain, for example, if a rickety boat packed with refugees introduced in the first tale will reach the Florida coast. Spare, elegant and moving, these stories cohere into a superb collection.

The 20th anniversary edition of Edwidge Danticat's groundbreaking debut, now an established classic--revised and with a new introduction by the author, and including extensive bonus materials

At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti—to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary debut, Danticat evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti—and the enduring strength of Haiti’s women—with vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people’s suffering and courage.

A collection of exceptional new essays by one of the most significant contemporary writers on the world stage

Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We’re Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience.

From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides in both tragedies and triumphs.

Danticat is an irresistible presence on the page: full of heart, outrage, humor, clear thinking, and moral questioning, while reminding us of the possibilities of community. And so “we’re alone” is both a fearsome admission and an intimate invitation―we’re alone now, we can talk. We’re Alone is a book that asks us to think through some of the world’s intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.

From the bestselling author of Everything Inside comes a vivid, timely story, moving from Haiti to Brooklyn to Miami, of a woman whose sense of self and family are called into question when she gets caught in a random act of violence one sunny Florida day.

“Is home the place where we are born? Or is it the place where we die?” These questions haunt Magnolia, a successful Haitian American real estate agent in Miami, after she hears the terrifying sounds of gunfire while shopping for her daughter’s first-ever cell phone; she takes shelter in a restaurant called Oasis, cowering with fellow shoppers and diners, each praying to their respective gods.

Once she’s safely home, Magnolia hides the fact that she was at the mall shooting from everyone close to her. But given her life back, she begins to see it all clearly, and as if for the first time—what the extraordinary bond she has with her daughter, Zoë, really means to her, and what Zoë may feel in return; what the nearly broken relationship she has with her partner, Harrison, has cost her, despite his love for her and their daughter; why her mentally troubled mother—whose unraveling patterns Magnolia worries she’s spiraling toward herself—might be so ghost-haunted; what the source of her father’s pain, and his reason for seeking solace in the arms of a mistress, really is. As Magnolia struggles through the labyrinth of her past, she must also come to terms with the losses sustained that traumatic day, losses that we all bear witness to all too often in our troubling times.

Can love, can family, protect us from harm? Does optimism or fear win out in one’s heart, one’s soul? Which side will win out for Magnolia—and where does she really belong? Pulled between these questions, and her beloved, high-stakes choices and worlds—Miami or Haiti, single or married, mortal or ghost, before or after—Magnolia is one of the most compelling characters that Danticat has ever created—a narrator who is "yon pati koukouy, part firefly": shimmering, flitting between choices, drawn to the light yet emitting her own.

Taking its title from the Creole word for mourning, Dèy is a profoundly warm and moving novel about the importance of sharing grief and leave-taking, but also of the ties of family—takeout dinners around a table, fresh dirt on a plant’s roots in the garden, swimming together in the azure seas. As Magnolia questions whether all has not yet been lost, Dèy celebrates the complexity of life in a brave and striking novel that is one of Danticat’s most powerful and deeply affecting works yet, told with a signature “unfaltering voice and evocative beauty” (The Boston Globe).

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.

With On Girlhood, Edim has beautifully curated a canonical work centering around the voices of young Black characters as they contend with innocence, belonging, love, and self-discovery. From the timeless lessons in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (“this is how you smile to someone you like completely”) to those in Dana Johnson’s “Melvin in the Sixth Grade” (“this is how kids start fights”), these short stories illuminate the power and the precariousness of Black girlhood. Highlighting both iconic and lesser-known authors—Edwidge Danticat, Amina Gautier, Dorothy West, Paule Marshall, Shay Youngblood, and more—this is an indispensable compendium that will instill readers with “the nerve to walk [their] own way” (Zora Neale Hurston).

EVENT DEETS: 

When: December 5 at 630 PM

Where: Kindred Stories (2304 Stuart Street, HTX 77004)

How: RSVP for your time with Glory. Please purchase On Girlhood if you have not to support our programming. 

About The Book

Proudly introducing the Well-Read Black Girl Library Series, On Girlhood is a lovingly curated anthology celebrating short fiction from such luminaries as Rita Dove, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and more.

Featuring stories by: Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Dorothy West, Rita Dove, Camille Acker, Toni Cade Bambara, Amina Gautier, Alexia Arthurs, Dana Johnson, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edwidge Danticat, Shay Youngblood, Paule Marshall, and Zora Neale Hurston.

“When you look over your own library, who do you see?” asks Well-Read Black Girl founder Glory Edim in this lovingly curated anthology. Bringing together an array of “unforgettable, and resonant coming-of-age stories” (Nicole Dennis-Benn), Edim continues her life’s work to brighten and enrich American reading lives through the work of both canonical and contemporary Black authors—from Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison to Dana Johnson and Alexia Arthurs. Divided into four themes—Innocence, Belonging, Love, and Self-Discovery—On Girlhood features fierce young protagonists who contend with trials that shape who they are and what they will become. At times heartbreaking and hilarious, the stories within push past flat stereotypes and powerfully convey the beauty of Black girlhood, resulting in an indispensable compendium for every home library.

About The Author