CANR
WORK TITLE: Putting Myself Together
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Bennington
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Antiguan
LAST VOLUME: CANR 263
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born Elaine Potter Richardson, May 25, 1949, in St. Johns, Antigua; daughter of a carpenter/cabinet maker and Annie Richardson; married Allen Shawn (a composer and professor; divorced, 2002); children: Annie, Harold.
EDUCATION:Attended New School for Social Research (now New School University); attended Franconia College; holds a Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. New Yorker, New York, NY, staff writer, 1976-95; Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA, Josephine Olp Weeks Chair and professor of literature; Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence Emerita, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Has also worked as a nanny.
MEMBER:American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
AWARDS:Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1983, for At the Bottom of the River; Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund annual writer’s award, 1992; Boston Book Review Fisk Fiction Prize, and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, both 1997, both for The Autobiography of My Mother; National Book Award nomination, 1997, and Prix Femina Étranger, 2000, both for My Brother; Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, 1999; Clifton Fadiman Medal, Center for Fiction, 2010, for Annie John. Honorary degrees from Williams College and Long Island College, both 1991, Colgate University, Amherst College, Bard College, and Tufts University, 2011; Hadada Award for lifetime achievement, Paris Review, 2022.
RELIGION: Jewish.WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Snapshots: Twentieth-Century Mother-Daughter Fiction, D. Godine (Boston, MA), 2000; and Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, Invisible Cities Press (Montpelier, VT), 2000. Contributor to periodicals, including Architectural Digest. Recordings include Jamaica Kincaid Interview with Kay Bonetti, American Audio Prose Library (Columbia, MO), 1991; Jamaica Kincaid Reads Annie John (The Red Girl Section), At the Bottom of the River (Girl and My Mother Sections), and Lucy, American Audio Prose Library, 1991; and Jamaica Kincaid Reading Her Short Story At the Bottom of the River, Library of Congress Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, 1995.
Excerpts from A Small Place make up parts of the narrative in the 2001 documentary Life and Debt.
SIDELIGHTS
Jamaica Kincaid gained wide acclaim with her first two works, At the Bottom of the River and Annie John. In these and other books about life on the Caribbean island of Antigua, where she was born, Kincaid employs a highly poetic literary style celebrated for its rhythms, imagery, characterization, and elliptic narration. When she was seventeen years of age, Kincaid, whose given name was Elaine Potter Richardson, left the rural island to become an au pair in New York City. By the time she returned to Antigua almost twenty years later, she had become a successful writer for New Yorker magazine under her chosen name.
In her first collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River, Kincaid shows an imposing capacity for detailing life’s mundane aspects. This characteristic of her writing is readily evident in the oft-cited tale “Girl,” which consists almost entirely of a mother’s orders to her daughter: “Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil … on Sundays try to walk like a lady, and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.” Anne Tyler the New Republic declared that this passage provides “the clearest idea of the book’s general tone; for Jamaica Kincaid scrutinizes various particles of our world so closely and so solemnly that they begin to take on a nearly mystical importance.” “The Letter from Home,” also from At the Bottom of the River, serves as further illustration of Kincaid’s style of repetition and her penchant for the mundane. In this tale a character recounts her daily chores in such a manner that the story resembles an incantation: “I milked the cows, I churned the butter, I stored the cheese, I baked the bread, I brewed the tea,” Kincaid begins. In Ms., Suzanne Freeman cited this tale as evidence that Kincaid’s style is “akin to hymn-singing or maybe even chanting.” Freeman added that Kincaid’s “singsong style” produces “images that are as sweet and mysterious as the secrets that children whisper in your ear.”
With the publication of At the Bottom of the River Kincaid was hailed as an important new voice in American fiction. Edith Milton wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Kincaid’s tales “have all the force of illumination, and even prophetic power.” David Leavitt noted in Village Voice that the author’s stories move “with grace and ease from the mundane to the enormous,” and added that “Kincaid’s particular skill lies in her ability to articulate the internal workings of a potent imagination without sacrificing the rich details of the external world on which that imagination thrives.” Doris Grumbach expressed similar praise in the Washington Post Book World, declaring that the world of Kincaid’s narrators “hovers between fantasy and reality.” Kincaid’s prose “results not so much in stories as in states of consciousness,” Grumbach noted, adding that the author’s style, particularly its emphasis on repetition, intensifies “the feelings of poetic jubilation Kincaid has … for all life.”
This exuberance for life is also evident in Kincaid’s second book, Annie John, which contains interrelated stories about a girl’s maturation in Antigua. In Annie John the title character evolves from a young girl to an aspiring nurse and from innocent to realist: she experiences her first menstruation, buries a friend, gradually establishes a life independent of her mother, and overcomes a serious illness. She is ultimately torn by her pursuit of a career outside her life in Antigua, and Kincaid renders that feeling so incisively that, as Elaine Kendall noted in her review for Los Angeles Times, “you can almost believe Kincaid invented ambivalence.”
Critically acclaimed as a coming-of-age novel, Annie John was praised by a number of reviewers for expressing qualities of growing up that transcend geographical locations. Noting the book’s vivid “recollections of childhood,” Paula Bonnell remarked in Boston Herald that Annie John “conveys the mysterious power and intensity of childhood attachments to mother, father and friends, and the adolescent beginnings of separation from them.” Susan Kenney, writing in the New York Times Book Review, noted Annie John’s ambivalence about leaving behind her life in Antigua and declared that such ambivalence is “an inevitable and unavoidable result of growing up.” Kenney concluded that Kincaid’s story is “so touching and familiar … so inevitable [that] it could be happening to any of us, anywhere, any time, any place. And that’s exactly the book’s strength, its wisdom, and its truth.”
Kincaid’s novel Lucy is a first-person narrative in which the nineteen-year-old title character not only expresses feelings of rage, but struggles with separation from her homeland and especially her mother. Lucy is a young woman from Antigua who comes to an unnamed American city to work as an au pair. She is employed by a wealthy, white couple, Mariah and Lewis, to take care of their four young daughters. In Washington Post Book World, Susanna Moore commented: “Lucy is unworldly. She has never seen snow or been in an elevator. … Written in the first person, [the novel] is Lucy’s story of the year of her journey—away from her mother, away from home, away from the island and into the world.” Richard Eder mused in Los Angeles Times Book Review that Lucy’s “anger … is an instrument of discovery, not destruction. It is lucid and cool, but by no means unsparing.”
The novel ends with Lucy writing in a journal given to her by Mariah, the woman for whom she works, and weeping over the very first line: “‘I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it.’ And then as I looked at this sentence a great wave of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one great blur.”
The Autobiography of My Mother follows Kincaid’s two previous fictional efforts in its West Indies setting and vivid, poetic prose. The book’s narrator, Xuela, is an elderly woman who recounts her difficult life, beginning with the death of her mother at Xuela’s birth. In what reviewers have termed a chilling, unsparing tone, Xuela describes her childhood abuse at the hands of a stepmother; the corruption of her father, a policeman; and her decision to abort her unborn child after she realizes the baby is intended for its father and his barren wife. At the end of the novel, the narrator calls her account a story of the mother she never knew, of her unborn baby, and of “the voices that should have come out of me, the faces I never allowed to form, the eyes I never allowed to see me,” as quoted by Dale Peck in London Review of Books.
As with the author’s earlier works, The Autobiography of My Mother received significant critical praise, especially for Kincaid’s lyrical writing style. “Kincaid has written a truly ugly meditation on life in some of the most beautiful prose we are likely to find in contemporary fiction,” averred Cathleen Schine in New York Times Book Review. Maclean’s reviewer Diane Turbide concurred, noting: “Kincaid employs an almost incantatory tone, using repetition and unusual syntax to give the book a hypnotic rhythm.” Several reviewers commented that the author’s striking prose is not matched by the novel’s thematic development. Schine stated: “There is … something dull and unconvincing about Xuela’s anguish.” According to Peck, “the prose is lovely … and … distinctly, beautifully American, yet the sentiments expressed by the words themselves are trite, falsely universalising, and often just muddled.” In contrast, Time reviewer John Skow stated of The Autobiography of My Mother: “The reward here, as always with Kincaid’s work, is the reading of her clear, bitter prose.”
In Mr. Potter Kincaid spins a story about an illiterate chauffeur who fathers numerous children with various women and abandons them all. The idea is based on Kincaid’s own profligate father, showing the author once again blurring the lines between truth and fiction in her novels. As Donna Seaman noted in Booklist, “Kincaid cares little about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction since all of her incantatory yet thorny works are insistently self-referential.” In an interview with Kim McLarin for Black Issues Book Review, Kincaid said the idea came to her while she was thinking about her mother. “The more I thought of her life,” Kincaid told McLarin, “and how it was that I grew up without knowing this person that she loathed and who was my father, the more I wanted to write this book. Here was a person she absolutely detested. She never introduced me to him and he never had any interest in me. Although when I became a well-known [author], he came to visit me. When he found me not interested in the idea of his being my dad, he actually disinherited me. It’s in his will.”
A native Antiguan of African descent, the fictional Mr. Potter leads a predictable and unimaginative life. The book’s narrator is one of his many illegitimate children, but Potter has no emotional connection to her and little attachment to anything else in his life. The narrator perseveres, however, in conjuring a connection with her past by bringing her father’s life into some type of focus. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that, “as in her previous books, Kincaid has exquisite control over her narrator’s deep-seated rage, which drives the story but never overpowers it and is tempered by a clear-eyed sympathy.” Lyle D. Rosdahl, writing in Library Journal, called Mr. Potter “vivid and affecting reading.” In a review for Book, Paul Evans called the novel “astonishing and baffling, infuriating and gorgeous.” Rosdahl also noted that the main character is almost entirely unsympathetic but added that Kincaid manages “to summon up in us a genuine pathos for the man and, more so, his daughter. The author does this with word torrents that build and crest, plunging us mercilessly into the emptiness of Potter’s life.”
Kincaid combines her experiences of motherhood and marriage in See Now Then, an autobiographical novel that loops through nonlinear time. “Toxic emotions suffuse” the story, Jane Ciabattari wrote in the Boston Globe. “In sometimes circuitous language, [Kincaid] stretches a fraying marriage across the loom of time and picks it apart, stitch by stitch, obsessively rethinking how the relationship began, how and when it turned hateful.” The protagonist, Mrs. Sweet, is a wife and mother who lives in Vermont and enjoys gardening in her spare time. Her daughter is named Persephone and her son is named Heracles. The children’s mythical names hint at the mythical place they hold in Mrs. Sweet’s imagination, but Mr. Sweet holds no such sway. Soon, Mrs. Sweet realizes that her withdrawn husband has grown to resent her, signaling the beginning of the end of their marriage. “It’s not a book in the usual way of and then and then and next,” Kincaid told a National Public Radio Web site interviewer. “It doesn’t have what you’d call a traditional structure or a traditional narrative. But it’s very structured, it’s very mannered, actually, in the way your mind might work.”
New York Times Book Review contributor Dwight Garner was not a fan of Kincaid’s approach, commenting that “ See Now Then becomes self-consciously clotted and grandiose whenever the subject of time heaves into view. You will have to back up and reread many of the sentences here.” Garner went on to conclude: “This bipolar novel is half séance, half ambush. See Now Then is the kind of lumpy exorcism that many writers would have composed and then allowed to remain unpublished. It picks up no moral weight as it rolls along. It asks little of us, and gives little in return.” A Kirkus Reviews critic was far more forgiving, remarking that although “the time-folding makes the narrative feel static, an artful set of complaints … Kincaid’s audaciousness is winning,” and “she’s taken some much-needed whacks at the conventional domestic novel.” Marie Arana in the Washington Post praised the novel further, declaring: “Man marries. Woman grows old and fat. Man throws her over for a prettier version. It’s a familiar story. Yet, in Jamaica Kincaid’s voice, the scorned woman’s fury becomes a spellbinding tale, as lyrical as Paradise Lost, as resonant as a Greek epic. This is hell like none other. You descend it circle by circle, and, word by word, you yield to the storyteller’s art.”
In addition to her autobiographical fiction and nonfiction, Kincaid has produced several books on gardening. As the editor and author of introduction of My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love, she creates an “enchanting. … fascinating compilation,” according to Booklist contributor Brad Hooper. My Favorite Plant contains “thirty-five brief essays and poems” and is, judged a Publishers Weekly critic, “often beautiful, though some of its parts are not as radiant as others, and a few have yet to blossom.”
Published in 1999, My Garden (Book) consists of a “personable and brightly descriptive, if somewhat rambling, book-length essay” that “shuttles constantly and with ease between the practical, technical difficulties of gardening and … larger meanings,” observed a writer for Publishers Weekly. Alice Joyce, writing in Booklist, added that “Kincaid’s views extend beyond the musings found in your usual garden journal.” The author pairs “smart-mouth observations” with “intriguing autobiographical tidbits.” Noting that Kincaid’s “personality pervades the writing” in My Garden (Book), Daniel Starr remarked in Library Journal that the author “may be crank, but she is always entertaining.” Kincaid reveals “her love-hate relationship with gardening” in this “robust hybrid of memoir and gardener’s journal,” stated Megan Harlan in an Entertainment Weekly assessment of My Garden (Book).
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Kincaid’s next gardening-related book was An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children. Kincaid has described her motivation as writing a book about plants that she would have enjoyed reading as a child. The encyclopedia-like entries focus on plants and the history behind them, some of which points to the brutality of colonialism, as plant species were introduced into new lands for sometimes nefarious reasons. The book is hardly just for children, however, and adults will appreciate it on a different level. Vivid watercolor illustrations by the world-renowned artist Kara Walker contribute to both the book’s style and the information communicated.
In the New York Times Book Review, Celia McGee praised the book as both “charming and instructive.” McGee wrote that Kincaid’s historical writing reveals “conquest as arrogant and destructive, [and] economics as exploitation.” McGee was especially taken with Walker’s illustrations, calling her “fiercely imaginative.” McGee pointed out that children may need an older reader to explain some of Kincaid’s allusions but that the book can be enjoyed by both children and adults. In BookPage, Laura Hutson Hunter praised the book as a “precious volume” that will be a “treat to gardeners, children, artists, poets and book lovers alike.”
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With her memoir My Brother, Kincaid recounts the last years of life of her brother, Devon Drew, who died of AIDS in January of 1996 at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid left the island of Antigua when her brother was age three; when she returns they are strangers to each other, and she only learns of his bisexuality after his death. Kincaid reveals that during the period in which she bought medication for him, her brother was still engaging in unprotected sex. The reader also learns that her brother was a drug addict and that he had served time in prison for his involvement in a murder. While My Brother provides a portrait of the author’s sibling, it also explores Kincaid’s own reactions to her brother’s life and death. The book also returns to ground made familiar in Kincaid’s novels, offering another look at Antigua, which the author describes in My Brother as homophobic, and revisiting her problematic relationship with her mother.
As with the author’s previous works, reviewers pointed to her distinctive writing style. Anna Quindlen in the New York Times Book Review noted that Kincaid’s “endless incantatory sentences [are] a contrast to the simple words and images—a tower built of small bricks.” Even though she pointed out that “the unadorned, often flat style of Kincaid’s prose can occasionally feel perfunctory,” Quindlen argued that “its great advantage is that within the simple setting the observations glow.” Regarding the memoir’s narrative structure, Gay Wachman in Nation maintained that “the lucid, assertive, deceptively simple voice takes its time in fleshing out the figures of the memoir, both in their present and in the past, circling around Devon and the multiple meanings of his life, illness and death.” Referring to “the measured and limpid simplicity of her prose,” Deborah E. McDowell in Women’s Review of Books linked My Brother to earlier works by the author in declaring that “despite the grimness of her work, few writers have made the aesthetics of death and darkness more luminous than has Jamaica Kincaid.”
Kincaid’s Talk Stories collects several “Talk of the Town” essays she wrote for the New Yorker from 1978 to 1983. The pieces were written before she became a well-known writer, and only one of them had her byline when published in the magazine. Nancy P. Shires, writing in Library Journal, noted: “The hallmarks of her style are seen developing here: the close observation of the mundane, use of repetition, lyrical and rhythmic qualities, elliptical narration, and ambivalence, experimentation, and humor.” The “Talk of the Town” pieces cover a wide range of topics, befitting the diverse city that it focuses on, from New York City’s West Indian-American Day carnival to the haunts of the rich and famous.
A Publishers Weekly contributor called the book “an astounding display of early literary skill and youthful daring,” while Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, called the volume “great fun to read” and “a literary feast of dishes both salty and sweet, bracing and voluptuous.”
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Kincaid used her New Yorker writings in a different way with her picture book Party: A Mystery. Its genesis was as a 1980 story that appeared in the New Yorker to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Nancy Drew books. Almost forty years later, Kincaid reworked the story for children with illustrations by Ricardo Cortés. It features three girls who attend a party to celebrate Nancy Drew, where there are lots of distractions. Then the two older ones see something terrible that disturbs them. The youngest one tries to get them to explain it to her, but then whatever it is disappears. It should be noted that, although the book is illustrated and is only thirty-two pages, it is probably designed more for seven- to ten-year-olds rather than beginning readers.
Reviewers were charmed by both the story and the old-fashioned illustrations, but they all pointed out that there is no resolution to the mystery, which may frustrate some readers who are used to neat-and-tidy mysteries. A contributor in Publishers Weekly called it a “gem” and praised the “detailed, almost photographically realistic portraits of girls and partygoers.” In School Library Journal, Margaret Kennedy described it as a “charming book about character and suspense,” and she wrote, “Each girl is so unique and amiable that readers will be drawn into the mystery before they know it, desperately searching for clues.” A reviewer in Children’s Bookwatch was the most enthusiastic of all, praising the book as “extraordinary and highly recommended.” They too predicted the mystery would captivate younger children.
In Putting Myself Together: Writings 1974-, Kincaid collected more than fifty different nonfiction pieces she wrote from 1973 to 2020. Publications include the Village Voice and Ms., along with the New Yorker. Some of the articles were essays or introductions, others functioned as memoir, one was an interview. Those familiar with Kincaid will not be surprised that certain themes recur: gardening, family, racism, and colonialism. An introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. celebrates Kincaid’s life and writing.
“A spirited miscellany” is how a contributor in Kirkus Reviews described the book. They noted that the book is full of Kincaid’s “sharp opinions” that can be traced, at least in part, to how Kincaid and her family grew up in a land under the colonial domination of England. The reviewer also points out, however, that essays on friendship, gardening, and her children are “in a different mood entirely.” “A triumph” is what a reviewer in Publishers Weekly called the book. They wrote, “Kincaid’s cutting prose shines, and the collection makes for a marvelous account” of Kincaid’s career.
Writing in the Washington Post, Jess Row analyzed Kincaid’s writing and pointed out how she uses “repetition as a kind of accumulative force, declaring her intent to take up space on the page and in your mind.” Ross wrote that she found that approach “appropriate,” for it reveals how Kincaid’s writing is “commensurate with her lifelong desire to find a new form, and a new way of life, because the old ways make no sense to her.” Ross especially recommended reading Putting Myself Together alongside Talk Stories, so that readers “can see the complete evolution of Kincaid as an artist and a thinker.” The result reveals why “Kincaid is so singularly important.” Donna Seaman, in Booklist, echoed those thoughts, writing that the book reveals Kincaid as an “incisive, creative, lacerating, fearless, and sly extrapolator and an incantatory stylist.”
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BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Black Literature Criticism, Volume 2, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1991.
Bloom, Harold, editor, Jamaica Kincaid, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1998.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 43, 1987, Volume 68, 1991.
Cudjoe, Selwyn R., editor, Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, Callaloo (Wellesley, MA), 1990.
Ferguson, Moira, Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1994.
Kincaid, Jamaica, At the Bottom of the River, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1983.
Kincaid, Jamaica, Lucy, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1990.
Kincaid, Jamaica, The Autobiography of My Mother, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1995.
Kincaid, Jamaica, My Brother, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1997.
Simmons, Diane, Jamaica Kincaid, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1994.
PERIODICALS
Black Issues Book Review, March, 2001, Robert Fleming, review of Talk Stories, p. 67; July-August, 2002, Kim McLarin, review of Mr. Potter, p. 34; May-June, 2005, Regina Cash-Clark, review of Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, p. 64.
Book, May-June, 2002, Paul Evans, review of Mr. Potter, p. 72.
Booklist, August, 1998, Brad Hooper, review of My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love, p. 1946; September 15, 1999, Alice Joyce, review of My Garden (Book), p. 210; November 15, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of Talk Stories, p. 586; March 1, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of Mr. Potter, p. 1052; November 15, 2012, Donna Seaman, review of See Now Then, p. 20; August, 2025, Donna Seaman, review of Putting Myself Together: Writings 1974-, pp. 23+.
BookPage, August, 2024, Laura Hutson Hunter, review of An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, p. 5.
Boston Globe, February 16, 2013, Jane Ciabattari, review of See Now Then.
Boston Herald, March 31, 1985, Paula Bonnell, review of Annie John.
Children’s Bookwatch, July, 2019, review of Party: A Mystery.
CLA Journal, March, 2000, K.B. Conal Byrne, “Under English, Obeah English: Jamaica Kincaid’s New Language,” pp. 276-277.
Entertainment Weekly, December 3, 1999, Megan Harlan, review of My Garden (Book), p. 94.
Essence, May, 2001, “First Person Singular,” interview, p. 108.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2012, review of See Now Then; April 15, 2019, review of Party; May 15, 2025, review of Putting Myself Together.
Library Journal, October 1, 1999, Daniel Starr, review of My Garden (Book), p. 125; October 15, 2000, Nancy P. Shires, review of Talk Stories, p. 70; April 1, 2002, Lyle D. Rosdahl, review of Mr. Potter, p. 140; January 1, 2005, Edward J. Valauskas, review of Among Flowers, p. 137; February 1, 2013, Lauren Gilbert, review of See Now Then, p. 62.
London Review of Books, February 6, 1997, Dale Peck, review of The Autobiography of My Mother, p. 25.
Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1985, Elaine Kendall, review of Annie John.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 21, 1990, Richard Eder, review of Lucy.
Maclean’s, April 8, 1996, Diane Turbide, review of The Autobiography of My Mother, p. 72.
Ms., January, 1984, Suzanne Freeman, review of At the Bottom of the River, p. 15.
Nation, November 3, 1997, Gay Wachman, review of My Brother, p. 43.
New Republic, December 31, 1983, Anne Tyler, review of At the Bottom of the River.
New York Times Book Review, January 15, 1984, Edith Milton, review of At the Bottom of the River, p. 22; April 7, 1985, Susan Kenney, review of Annie John, p. 6; February 4, 1996, Cathleen Schine, review of The Autobiography of My Mother, p. 5; October 19, 1997, Anna Quindlen, review of My Brother, p. 7; May 12, 2002, Sophie Harrison, review of Mr. Potter, p. 7; February 12, 2013, Dwight Garner, review of See Now Then; April 21, 2024, Celia McGee, “How Did Our Gardens Grow?” review of An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, p. 26.
People, June 24, 2002, review of Mr. Potter, p. 394.
Publishers Weekly, August 31, 1998, review of My Favorite Plant, p. 57; December 6, 1999, review of My Garden (Book), p. 67; January 15, 2001, review of Talk Stories, p. 61; March 11, 2002, review of Mr. Potter, p. 49; December 20, 2004, review of Among Flowers, p. 47; December 10, 2012, review of See Now Then, p. 36; March 4, 2019, review of Party, p. 82; October 14, 2019, Matia Burnett, “The Mystery of the Talk of the Town Picture Book: How Jamaica Kincaid Turned a New Yorker Story Inspired by Nancy Drew into a Children’s Book,” author interview, pp. 16A+; June 2, 2025, review of Putting Myself Together, p. 75.
School Library Journal, June, 2019, Margaret Kennedy, review of Party, p. 63.
Time, February 5, 1996, John Skow, review of The Autobiography of My Mother, p. 71.
Village Voice, January 17, 1984, David Leavitt, review of At the Bottom of the River.
Washington Post, February 4, 2013, Marie Arana, review of See Now Then; August 9, 2025, Jess Row, review of Putting Myself Together.
Washington Post Book World, October 7, 1990, Doris Grumbach, review of At the Bottom of the River.
Women’s Review of Books, January, 1998, Deborah E. McDowell, review of My Brother, p. 1.
ONLINE
Berkshire, https://www.berkshiremag.com/ (May 14, 2024), Laura Mars, author interview.
Claremont McKenna College Web site, http://www.cmc.edu/ (October 1, 2013), author profile.
NPR Web site, http://www.npr.org/ (March 3, 2013), author interview.
Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (April 9, 2004), Dwight Garner, interview with Kincaid.*
May 14, 2024
5 min read
ON WRITING, DAFFODILS, AND CHILDREN
By Laura Mars
From the pages of our May/June 2024 Issue.
Courtesy MIRANDA R. BARNES
Courtesy MIRANDA R. BARNES
Jamaica Kincaid is a Jewish Afro-Carribean author, born in Antigua. The novelist, essayist, and gardener writes about colonialism, migration, mother-daughter relationships, loss, and, yes, gardening. She has published over a dozen books, notably At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, A Small Place, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother. Kincaid is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University and the recipient of numerous national and international awards, most recently The Paris Review Hadada in 2022, their annual lifetime achievement award. Her life in America began when she was sent to New York at age 17 to work as an au pair to help support her family. Heartbroken and angry not to be attending a university, she stopped sending money home, and “became the best-dressed servant you ever saw.” In her early 20s, she started writing for The Village Voice, Ingenue, and The New Yorker. From her home in North Bennington, Vermont, Kincaid offers a glimpse of what we can expect when she speaks at the Authors Guild Foundation’s WIT Festival in Lenox, September 27–29.
You wrote for The New Yorker for 20 years. How has your writing changed? I've become more revealing about my real feelings, and the language has become, in some ways, more rough. I am not as kind to myself as a writer. I used to, perhaps, protect myself from my own violent thoughts, frank thoughts. I'm less likely to do that now.
Do you have a favorite literary genre? Oh, no, no. People writing the Bible, what genre were they writing? Or The Iliad? Shakespeare was a playwright, but was he a playwright when he was writing? Or was he a writer? Issues of genre are convenient for people who have to sell them. “These are not beans. They are canola beans. They are red beans. They are beans from Italy.” It is true that when I'm writing certain things, I adhere to a different morality. When I was writing a book about my brother dying of AIDS, I made sure that everything in it was factually true, because I had an obligation to him. But when I'm writing something in which I'm only obligated to my own sense of morality, my own understanding of certain things, then I approach the writing in a different way. I didn't always understand this, but I've come to see that the notion of genre has been ruinous to a writer, or to literature.
You are an avid gardener, and gardening is the subject of several of your books. What does your garden look like today? Last week, it looked like Greenland, just this sheet of white. Then it melted and the daffodils, Rijnveld’s Early Sensation, came up, a little shyly. I used to hate daffodils because we had to memorize this poem by Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” that was all about daffodils. When it occurred to me that it was not the daffodils’ fault that I was forced to memorize a poem about them, I decided to plant the whole yard with daffodils. I started with 1,000, and last year the total was over 22,000. It’s just a sea of daffodils. I call it “Redeeming Wordsworth.” The garden is a form of writing for me, always telling me about itself. The Twin Leaf, for example, whose proper name is Jeffersonia diphylla, was named after Thomas Jefferson by his friend who just thought it was a beautiful plant—one leaf that is separated into two, and the two halves are not identical. But it absolutely describes Jefferson and his nature. He's one thing, and he's the opposite of that, but he's the same person. I also grow lots of things that I would grow in the Caribbean, like cotton. I never get cotton, but it has a beautiful flower, different colors, pink and yellow. It's a very beautiful plant that was put to a very vicious use, and I grow it for that reason—to redeem it. So many things in the garden are innocent of how we use them.
Your latest book, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, illustrated by Kara Walker, will be released May 7. It is full of provocative illustrations and language that describes not only plants and flowers, but events in history. What is the message? I didn't think of it so much as a message but as the joy of knowing something. If you're a child from the West Indies and your parents give you breadfruit, it'd be wonderful to know how it got there. Native to the Pacific Islands, to Tahiti, it was brought to the West Indies to feed slaves. I've never met a child who liked breadfruit, as if we instinctively know its origins. If you enjoy an orange or a rose, wouldn’t you want to know where it came from? Once you start talking about cotton, sugarcane, nutmeg, about the vegetable kingdom, you are talking about history. Rubber is native to Brazil, but the Dutch took it. Tea belongs in China, but it became a commodity and changed the culture. Dahlias, whose 2327 hollow stems were used to treat urinary tract infections, are native to Mexico, and Europeans took it to Europe. Am I writing about plants, am I writing about history, or am I writing about evil?
Do you have a favorite letter in your new book? My favorite illustration is Nicotiana, a person lying clearly dead, with a beautiful nicotine plant coming out of her, blooming. It's so poignant. Nicotiana is named after a Frenchman, Jean Nicot.
What age child do you see reading An Encyclopedia? This is just the book I would have wanted as a child. My childhood was complicated, but among the joys was being taught to read at a very early age. I would read anything in front of me. While people were playing, I would read and steal books. For my seventh birthday, my mother gave me the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. An Encyclopedia would have been heaven, a book that told you things and showed you things. So, it’s really written for the seven-year-old child I was. Children are incredibly curious, and it just drives me crazy how we infantilize children's literature. I was reading to my granddaughter, who is only three years old, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly, about the friendship between a First Lady and former slave. She just loved Mrs. Keckly.
Jamaica Kincaid
(Elaine Potter)
(b.1949)
Jamaica Kincaid is a novelist, gardener, and former reporter for The New Yorker Magazine. She is a Professor of Literature at Claremont-McKenna College.
New and upcoming books
August 2025
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Putting Myself Together
Novels
Annie John (1985)
Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip (1986)
A Small Place (1988)
Lucy (1990)
The Autobiography of My Mother (1996)
Mr. Potter (2002)
My Favorite Tool (2007)
See Now Then (2013)
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Novellas and Short Stories
At the Bottom of the River (1983)
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Party (2019)
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Jamaica (1986)
The Best American Essays 1995 (1995) (with Robert Atwan)
My Brother (1997)
Generations of Women (1998) (with Mariana Cook)
Poetics of Place (1998)
My Favorite Plant (1998)
My Garden (1999)
Talk Stories (2001)
Among Flowers (2004)
An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children (2024)
Putting Myself Together (2025)
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jamaica Kincaid
Kincaid in September 2019
Kincaid in September 2019
Born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson
May 25, 1949 (age 76)
St. John's, Antigua and Barbuda
Nationality
AntiguanAmerican
Education Franconia College (no degree)
Genre Fiction, memoir, essays
Notable works
Annie John (1985)
A Small Place (1988)
Lucy (1990)
Notable awards American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2004
Spouse Allen Shawn
(m. 1979; div. 2002)
Children 2
Jamaica Kincaid (/kɪnˈkeɪd/; born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949)[1] is an Antiguan–American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. Born in St. John's, the capital of Antigua and Barbuda, she now lives in North Bennington, Vermont, and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence, Emerita at Harvard University.[2]
Biography
Kincaid was born in St. John's on the island of Antigua, on 25 May 1949.[3] She grew up in relative poverty with her mother, a literate, cultured woman and homemaker, and her stepfather, a carpenter.[3][4][5][6] She was very close to her mother until her three brothers were born in quick succession, starting when Kincaid was nine years old. After her brothers' births, she resented her mother, who thereafter focused primarily on the brothers' needs. Kincaid later recalled,
Our family money remained the same, but there were more people to feed and to clothe, and so everything got sort of shortened, not only material things but emotional things. The good emotional things, I got a short end of that. But then I got more of things I didn't have, like a certain kind of cruelty and neglect.[5]
In an interview for The New York Times, Kincaid also said: "The way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me."[7]
Kincaid received, and frequently excelled in, a British education growing up, as Antigua did not gain independence from the United Kingdom until 1981.[3][5][8][9] Although she was intelligent and frequently tested at the top of her class, Kincaid's mother removed her from school at 16 to help support the family when her third and last brother was born, because her stepfather was ill and could no longer provide for the family.[5] In 1966, when Kincaid was 16, her mother sent her to Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb of New York City, to work as an au pair.[10] After this move, Kincaid refused to send money home; "she left no forwarding address and was cut off from her family until her return to Antigua 20 years later".[9]
Family
In 1979, Kincaid married the composer and Bennington College professor Allen Shawn, son of longtime The New Yorker editor William Shawn and brother of actor Wallace Shawn. The couple divorced in 2002. They have two children: a son, Harold, a graduate of Northeastern University, a music producer/songwriter who is the founder of Levelsoundz; and a daughter, Annie, who graduated from Harvard and now works in marketing. Kincaid is president of the official Levelsoundz Fan Club.
Kincaid is a keen gardener who has written extensively on the subject.
She converted to Judaism in 2005.[11]
Career overview
While working as an au pair, Kincaid enrolled in evening classes at a community college.[12] After three years, she resigned from her job to attend Franconia College in New Hampshire on a full scholarship. She dropped out after a year and returned to New York,[3] where she started writing for the teenage girls' magazine Ingénue, The Village Voice, and Ms. magazine.[13][14] She changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid in 1973, when her writing was first published.[15] She described this name change as "a way for [her] to do things without being the same person who couldn't do them — the same person who had all these weights".[8] Kincaid explained that "Jamaica" is an English corruption of what Columbus called Xaymaca, the part of the world that she comes from, and "Kincaid" appeared to go well with "Jamaica".[16] Her short fiction appeared in The Paris Review, and in The New Yorker, where her 1990 novel Lucy was originally serialized.[17]
Kincaid's work has been both praised and criticized for its subject matter because it largely draws upon her own life and because her tone is often perceived as angry.[12] Kincaid counters that many writers draw upon personal experience, so to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not valid criticism.[4]
Kincaid was the 50th commencement speaker at Bard College at Simon's Rock in 2019.[18]
The New Yorker
As a result of her budding writing career and friendship with George W. S. Trow, who wrote many pieces for The New Yorker column "The Talk of the Town",[3][19] Kincaid became acquainted with New Yorker editor William Shawn, who was impressed with her writing.[12] He employed her as a staff writer in 1976 and eventually as a featured columnist for Talk of the Town for nine years.[12] Shawn's tutelage legitimized Kincaid as a writer and proved pivotal to her development of voice. In all, she was a staff writer for The New Yorker for 20 years.[20] She resigned from The New Yorker in 1996 when then editor Tina Brown chose actress Roseanne Barr to guest-edit an issue as an original feminist voice. Though circulation rose under Brown, Kincaid was critical of Brown's direction in making the magazine less literary and more celebrity-oriented.[12]
Kincaid recalls that when she was a writer for The New Yorker, she would often be questioned, particularly by women, on how she was able to obtain her position. Kincaid felt that these questions were posed because she was a young black woman "from nowhere… I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for The New Yorker, I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people."[4]
Talk Stories was later published in 2001 as a collection of "77 short pieces Kincaid wrote for The New Yorker's 'Talk of the Town' column between 1974 and 1983".[21]
Recognition
In December 2021, Kincaid was announced as the recipient of the 2022 Paris Review Hadada Prize, the magazine's annual lifetime achievement award.[22]
Writing
Her novels are loosely autobiographical, though Kincaid has warned against interpreting their autobiographical elements too literally: "Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn't admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence."[23] Her work often prioritizes "impressions and feelings over plot development"[6] and features conflict with both a strong maternal figure and colonial and neocolonial influences.[24] Excerpts from her non-fiction book A Small Place were used as part of the narrative for Stephanie Black's 2001 documentary, Life and Debt.[25]
One of Kincaid's contributions according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr, African-American literary critic, scholar, writer, and public intellectual, is that:
She never feels the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world or a female sensibility. She assumes them both. I think it's a distinct departure that she's making, and I think that more and more black American writers will assume their world the way that she does. So that we can get beyond the large theme of racism and get to the deeper themes of how black people love and cry and live and die. Which, after all, is what art is all about.[8]
Themes
Kincaid's writing explores such themes as colonialism and colonial legacy, postcolonialism and neo-colonialism, gender and sexuality, renaming,[16] mother-daughter relationships, British and American imperialism, colonial education, writing, racism, class, power, death, and adolescence. In her most recent novel, See Now Then, Kincaid also first explores the theme of time.[4]
Tone and style
Kincaid's style has created disagreement among critics and scholars, and as Harold Bloom explains: "Most of the published criticism of Jamaica Kincaid has stressed her political and social concerns, somewhat at the expense of her literary qualities."[26] As works such as At the Bottom of the River and The Autobiography of My Mother use Antiguan cultural practices, some critics say these works employ magical realism. "The author claims, however, that [her work] is 'magic' and 'real,' but not necessarily [works] of 'magical realism'." Other critics claim that her style is "modernist" because much of her fiction is "culturally specific and experimental".[27] It has also been praised for its keen observation of character, curtness, wit,[5] and lyrical quality.[12] Her short story "Girl" is essentially a list of instructions on how a girl should live and act, but the messages are much larger than the literal list of suggestions. Derek Walcott, 1992 Nobel laureate, said of Kincaid's writing: "As she writes a sentence, psychologically, its temperature is that it heads toward its own contradiction. It's as if the sentence is discovering itself, discovering how it feels. And that is astonishing, because it's one thing to be able to write a good declarative sentence; it's another thing to catch the temperature of the narrator, the narrator's feeling. And that's universal, and not provincial in any way".[8] Susan Sontag has also commended Kincaid's writing for its "emotional truthfulness," poignancy, and complexity.[8] Her writing has been described as "fearless" and her "force and originality lie in her refusal to curb her tongue".[28] Giovanna Covi describes her unique writing: "The tremendous strength of Kincaid's stories lies in their capacity to resist all canons. They move at the beat of a drum and the rhythm of jazz…"[26] She is described as writing with a "double vision"[26] meaning that one line of plot mirrors another, providing the reader with rich symbolism that enhances the possibilities of interpretation.
Influences
Kincaid's writing is largely influenced by her life circumstances even though she discourages readers from taking her fiction literally.[5] To do so, according to the writer Michael Arlen, is to be "disrespectful of a fiction writer's ability to create fictional characters". Kincaid worked for Arlen, who would become a colleague at The New Yorker, as an au pair and is the figure whom the father in Lucy is based on. Despite her caution to readers, Kincaid has also said: "I would never say I wouldn't write about an experience I've had."[8]
Reception and criticism
The reception of Kincaid's work has been mixed. Her writing stresses deep social and even political commentary, as Harold Bloom cites as a reason why the "literary qualities" of her work tend to be less of a focus for critics.[26] Writing for Salon.com, Peter Kurth called Kincaid's work My Brother the most overrated book of 1997.[29] Reviewing her latest novel, See Now Then (2013), in The New York Times, Dwight Garner called it "bipolar", "half séance, half ambush", and "the kind of lumpy exorcism that many writers would have composed and then allowed to remain unpublished. It picks up no moral weight as it rolls along. It asks little of us, and gives little in return."[30] Another New York Times review describes it as "not an easy book to stomach" but goes on to explain, "Kincaid's force and originality lie in her refusal to curb her tongue, in an insistence on home truths that spare herself least of all."[28] Kate Tuttle addresses this in an article for The Boston Globe: "Kincaid allowed that critics are correct to point out the book's complexity. "The one thing the book is," she said, "is difficult, and I meant it to be."[31] Some critics have been harsh, such as one review for Mr Potter (2002) that reads: "It wouldn't be so hard if the repetition weren't coupled, here and everywhere it occurs, with a stern rebuff to any idea that it might be meaningful."[32] On the other hand, there has been much praise for her writing, for instance: "The superb precision of Kincaid's style makes it a paradigm of how to avoid lots of novelistic pitfalls."[33]
In February 2022, Kincaid was one of 38 Harvard faculty members to sign a letter to The Harvard Crimson defending Professor John Comaroff, who had been found to have violated the university's sexual and professional conduct policies. The letter defended Comaroff as "an excellent colleague, advisor and committed university citizen" and expressed dismay over his being sanctioned by the university.[34] After students filed a lawsuit with detailed allegations of Comaroff's actions and the university's failure to respond, Kincaid was one of several signatories to say that she wished to retract her signature.[35]
Bibliography
This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (November 2023)
Novels
Annie John (1985)
Lucy (1990)
The Autobiography of My Mother (1996)
Mr Potter (2002)
See Now Then (2013)[a]
Short fiction
Collections
At the Bottom of the River (1983)
Stories[b]
Title Year First published Reprinted/collected Notes
Ovando 1989 Conjunctions 14: 75–83
The finishing line 1990 New York Times Book Review 18
"Biography of a Dress" (1992), Grand Street 11: 92–100[c]
"Song of Roland" (1993), The New Yorker 69: 94–98
"Xuela" (1994), The New Yorker, 70: 82–92
Non-fiction
Collections
Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974— (2025)
Uncollected essays
"Antigua Crossings: A Deep and Blue Passage on the Caribbean Sea" (1978), Rolling Stone: 48–50.
"Figures in the Distance" (1983)
A Small Place (1988)
"On Seeing England for the First Time" (1991), Transition Magazine 51: 32–40
"Out of Kenya" (1991), The New York Times: A15, A19, with Ellen Pall
"Flowers of Evil: In the Garden" (1992), The New Yorker 68: 154–159
"A Fire by Ice" (1993), The New Yorker 69: 64–67
"Just Reading: In the Garden" (1993), The New Yorker 69: 51–55
"Alien Soil: In the Garden" (1993), The New Yorker 69: 47–52
"This Other Eden" (1993), The New Yorker 69: 69–73
"The Season Past: In the Garden" (1994), The New Yorker 70: 57–61
"In Roseau" (1995), The New Yorker 71: 92–99.
"In History" (1997), The Colors of Nature
My Brother (1997)
My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants they Love (1998), Editor
Talk Stories (2001)
My Garden (Book) (2001)
Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005)
"A heap of disturbance". In the Garden. The New Yorker. 96 (26): 24–26. September 7, 2020.[d]
"Time with Pryor". The Talk of the Town. January 12, 1976. The New Yorker. 98 (26): 16–17. August 29, 2022.[e][f]
Children's books
Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam, and Tulip (1986)
An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, (2024)[36]
———————
Notes
Lee, Felicia R. (February 4, 2013). "Jamaica Kincaid Isn't Writing About Her Life, She Says". The New York Times. Retrieved August 7, 2018.
Short stories unless otherwise noted.
Kincaid, Jamaica. "Biography of a Dress". Short Story Project. Retrieved March 15, 2018.
Online version is titled "The disturbances of the garden".
Originally published in the January 12, 1976 issue.
Online version is titled "Richard Pryor: 'I was born under the sign of funny'".
See also
Caribbean literature
Interviews
Selwyn Cudjoe, "Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview," Callaloo, 12 (Spring 1989): 396–411; reprinted in Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, ed. Cudjoe (Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux, 1990): 215–231.
Leslie Garis, "Through West Indian Eyes," New York Times Magazine (October 7, 1990): 42.
Donna Perry, "An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid," in Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1990): 492–510.
Kay Bonetti, "An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid," Missouri Review, 15, No. 2 (1992): 124–142.
Allan Vorda, "I Come from a Place That's Very Unreal: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid," in Face to Face: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists, ed. Vorda (Houston: Rice University Press, 1993): 77–105.
Moira Ferguson, "A Lot of Memory: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid," Kenyon Review, 16 (Winter 1994): 163–188.
Awards and honors
1984: Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for At the Bottom of the River[13]
1984: Shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for At the Bottom of the River.[37]
1985: Guggenheim Award for Fiction[38]
1985: Finalist for the International Ritz Paris Hemingway Award for Annie John
1992: Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Colgate University
1997: Shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Autobiography of My Mother[37]
1997: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for The Autobiography of My Mother[39]
1999: Lannan Literary Award for Fiction
2000: Prix Femina étranger for My Brother[40]
2004: American Academy of Arts and Letters[41]
2009: American Academy of Arts and Sciences[41]
2010: Center for Fiction's Clifton Fadiman Medal for Annie John[42]
2011: Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Tufts University[41]
2014: Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for See Now Then[43]
2015: Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Brandeis University
Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award[44]
2017: Winner of the Dan David Prize in Literature[45]
2021: Royal Society of Literature International Writer[46]
2021: Langston Hughes Medal
2022: The Paris Review Hadada prize for lifetime achievement[22]
Jamaica Kincaid, illus. by Ricardo Cortes. Black Sheep, $17.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-61775-716-7
This send-up of the Nancy Drew mysteries by Kincaid (See Now Then, for adults) first appeared as a 1980 New Yorker story about a gala celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first book's publication. Here, Kincaid's piece is recast as a picture book with dramatic artwork by Cortes (Sea Creatures from the Sky). Three girls of color--Pam, Bess, and Sue--watch the party from the sidelines, and they mount a set of marble stairs to survey the action from above. Bess obsesses about refreshments when suddenly, Pam spies something shocking: "Look!... How vile!... How bilious!" Bess witnesses it, too, but smaller Sue can't see what they're talking about ("You never tell me anything"). Before the two older girls can act, though, whatever disturbed them disappears, and the story ends. Detailed, almost photographically realistic portraits of girls and partygoers by Cortes, shown against marble architectural backdrops that suggest the New York Public Library, engage throughout. As an adult parody of hackneyed Stratemeyer Syndicate prose, it's a gem. But the enigmatic ending that worked as a spoof may baffle readers, rendering the picture book's success a bit of a mystery. Ages 3--7. Author's agent: Jeffrey Pasternak, Wylie Agency. Illustrator's agent: Stephen Barbara, InkWell Management. (June)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Party: A Mystery." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 9, 4 Mar. 2019, p. 82. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A578584277/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5ebabf78. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.
Kincaid, Jamaica PARTY Black Sheep Press (Children's Fiction) $17.95 6, 4 ISBN: 978-1-61775-716-7
Pam, Bess, and Bess' younger sister, Sue, visit a museum after hours for a celebration of the "publication of the first of the Nancy Drew mystery books" in this picture book based on a story originally published in 1980 in the New Yorker.
Although The Mystery of the Old Clock was originally published in 1930, Cortes does not set the story during the Depression: The girls--all three are black--wear modern casual clothing, and one appears to be holding a smartphone. When Pam climbs the stairs for a better vantage point from which to peer at the guests, she points out something shocking. Pam and Bess are aghast at whatever it is, but little sister Sue (and readers) remains clueless. Frustratingly, the pictures depict only their changing expressions over pages and pages and not what they actually see--though the last page might offer a visual hint. The stilted vocabulary seems to date back to Carolyn Keene's characters of that era: "querulous," "milling about," "bilious," and "hypers" (an exclamation), all incongruous with the characters' ages. Worse, one textual descriptor of Bess clashes with her depiction as a girl with dark brown skin: "her face turning first a ghostly white, then a vivid red." For white Bess Marvin, friend of Nancy Drew, this is possible, but blushing would not result in such a color change in a character with skin this dark. The color palette of the illustrations seems as dated as the museum--another reason this book will likely fail to appeal to young readers.
Nostalgic Nancy Drew fans will likely deem this experimental picture book a failed homage, and it will certainly disappoint young sleuths in search of a real mystery. (Picture book. 5-8)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Kincaid, Jamaica: PARTY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A582143972/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cfce4735. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.
KINCAID, Jamaica. Party. illus. by Ricardo Cortes. 32p. Akashic/Black Sheep. Jun. 2019. Tr $17.95. ISBN 9781617757167.
PreS-Gr 3--Pam, Bess, and Sue are all attending a fancy celebration of Nancy Drew at the New York Public Library and, in true Nancy spirit, decide to explore their surroundings. After making their way up a grand marble staircase, Sue notices the refreshments, while Pam and Bess notice something else. As the older girls each become more frightfully amazed at what they have seen, Sue searches for what has caught their interest. Kincaid has created a mystery, not just within her plot, but for readers as well. The girls, seemingly the only children at the gala, drive the action with their delightful personalities, detailed dialogue, and reactions to the big mystery. Some readers might be a bit confused by some of the fancier vocabulary used, but they are clearly a part of Bess and Pam's overall character. "How vile to say the least!" exclaims Bess. "How bilious!" says Pam. Each girl is so unique and amiable that readers will be drawn into the mystery before they know it, desperately searching for clues. Cortes's expressive paintings help to show the characters' personalities and the setting, providing some hidden hints to readers. VERDICT A charming book about character and suspense that will be intriguing to many young mystery readers, but the lack of a satisfying resolution may be more likely to frustrate and confound than delight.--Margaret Kennedy, iSchool at Urbana-Champaign, IL
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
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Kennedy, Margaret. "KINCAID, Jamaica. Party." School Library Journal, vol. 65, no. 6, June 2019, p. 63. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A587876126/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=372c831c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.
Party: A Mystery
Jamaica Kincaid, author
Ricardo Cortes, illustrator
Black Sheep
c/o Akashic Books
232 Third Street, #A115, Brooklyn, NY 11215
www.akashicbooks.com
9781617757167, $17.95, HC, 32pp, www.amazon.com
Pam, Beth, and Sue are three little girls who attend a party to celebrate the publication of the first of the Nancy Drew mystery books. There are many distractions at the fancy affair: flower arrangements, partygoers, refreshments, and lots and lots of marble. Suddenly, the oldest girl, Pam, sees what can only be described as something truly...bilious...not good! Beth sees it too. The youngest, Sue, does not, and as usual she has a hard time getting anyone to tell her anything. "Party: A Mystery" is a beautifully drawn picture book adventure story that promises questions that will grab children ages 3-7--but does not guarantee an answer! Unique, uncommon, entertaining, and thoroughly 'kid friendly', "Party: A Mystery" is an extraordinary and highly recommended addition to family, preschool, elementary school, and community library picture book collections!
Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/cbw/index.htm
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"Party: A Mystery." Children's Bookwatch, July 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A596362054/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fd4f7f30. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.
There's a storied history behind Party: A Mystery (Black Sheep/Akashic), a new picture book written by Jamaica Kincaid and illustrated by Ricardo Cortes. Kincaid originally wrote Party as a piece for adults to be published in the Talk of the Town section of the New Yorker in 1980. The literary inspiration for the piece, however, goes back much further than that. In the New Yorker story, three girls attend a party celebrating the publication of the Nancy Drew books. "I loved the books as a child in Antigua and I even still collect them today," Kincaid says. "Anyway, the point was to write an amusing piece about parties, and I used the characters from the books, friends of Nancy."
It would be many years before that story took on a whole new and unexpected life as a children's book. Typically, in the world of children's literature, it's an author or publisher who first reaches out to an artist. In this case, after illustrator Cortes discovered Kincaid's story in Talk Stories, a collection of her New Yorker pieces, he set the project in motion. Kincaid credits Cortes with having the vision to adapt the story to the new format. "The story in Party is really Ricardo's," she says. "The way of imagining it as a mystery that would interest a child is really his."
The picture book follows the basic premise behind Kincaid's story: three girls--Pam, Beth, and Sue--attend a party at the New York Public Library in celebration of the Nancy Drew books. Amid the refreshments and flowers, the girls spy something mysterious and unexpected that readers may not necessarily see themselves. As in Kincaid's original story, the mystery in the picture book is never fully explained, and much is left up to the reader's imagination.
Kincaid believes that, in illustrating Party, Cortes only enhanced the story's enigma, providing a greater sense of intrigue and playfulness likely to appeal to young readers. She particularly praises Cortes's conclusion." [Cortes] creates an ending that is unusual," she says. "We want things to be all wrapped up so we can all go to bed and sleep. But I believe he is saying that we can... dream also. Or we can sit and wonder. I think he is saying, 'What is there behind this curtain: dare I look?'"
Kincaid, who was such a voracious reader as a child that, she says, "I would even read the labels on boxes or tins of cocoa," believes it's a misconception that children eschew ambiguity in the books they read. "When I was a young reader, I never wanted certainty in literature," she says. "And now that I am an old reader, I want it even less."
For Cortes, it was precisely the story's unanswered questions that drew him to it. "I read it," he says. "It confused me, and I reread it immediately. It made me laugh, it frustrated me, and it left me a bit bewildered. I loved it!" He was struck by the story's subversion of traditional mystery story structures, which present a puzzle and then deliver a solution. "Jamaica's story grabbed my attention, and then almost as quickly left me, quite ridiculously, without an answer," Cortes says. "What a strange tease! Perhaps it was a play on the Nancy Drew template referenced in the story, or maybe the author simply wanted to stir up even more mystery for her own amusement."
Cortes liked the idea of creating a children's book that would challenge young readers' expectations and keep them guessing long after reading. "I imagined a child seeing a structure dismantled," he says, "and [thereby gaining] a new understanding of how a story could be created." Cortes says that when he first reached out to Kincaid with his idea to adapt the story, "she seemed bemused at the idea of revisiting and refashioning the prose... and she quite generously agreed to a collaboration."
So what actually is the nature of the "mystery" in the story? For Cortes, the not knowing is precisely the point. "The mystery of this book is a mystery itself, right?" he says. "That does so amuse me, and I certainly didn't want to ruin any interpretations by pressing the reader with my own suspicions of its nature." As much as Cortes loves the story's ambiguity, he says it "created an extraordinary challenge: telling a story simply through the emotions and expressions of the three main characters."
The images of the children in the book are based on three sisters he knows, Cortes says. "They were quite patient with me as I tried, over several visits, to give them direction so I might capture certain expressions." For Kincaid, Cortes's characters--three girls of color--bring an entirely new dimension to the story. "I love Ricardo's rendition of those girls," she says. "They seem so self-possessed and bold and not afraid of what they would find at the end of any journey they have embarked on."
Cortes feels that the story's open-endedness has an added benefit--readers can interpret the circumstances as they'd like. "I've been privy to many explanations from children to whom I've read the book," he says. "It's quite fun to hear them, and I've been genuinely impressed."
ON PARTY: A MYSTERY
Saturday, Nov. 23, 2 p.m.
Wembly's Author Tent
By Matia Burnett
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
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Burnett, Matia. "The Mystery of the Talk of the Town Picture Book: How Jamaica Kincaid turned a New Yorker story inspired by Nancy Drew into a children's book." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 41, 14 Oct. 2019, pp. 16A+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A603319070/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ba75cc2a. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.
AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GARDENING FOR COLORED CHILDREN: An Alphabetary of the Colonized World, by Jamaica Kincaid. Illustrated by Kara Walker.
It bears considering that had anything resembling ''An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children'' actually existed in the days of antebellum plantation culture, it would have been forbidden fruit: Few enslaved people, young or old, were allowed to learn to read or write.
With its mordantly anachronistic title and schoolroom-green cover, the book also serves as a reminder that the segregationist term ''colored,'' brought to you by the Jim Crow era, which extended well into the 20th century, drew lines almost as stark, limiting opportunities for many Black children to experience gardening as an activity of pure enjoyment. Jamaica Kincaid, now as well known for gardening writing as for fiction, once put it this way (about her garden in Vermont): ''I have joined the conquering class: Who else could afford this garden -- a garden in which I grow things that it would be much cheaper to buy at the store?''
In collaborating with the fiercely imaginative visual artist Kara Walker, Kincaid has transposed this mode of thinking into an amalgam of erudition, discourse, storytelling and picture book art. A simple child's garden of ABCs their ''encyclopedia'' is not.
Kincaid's adult base, too, will gravitate toward it, and occasionally want to elucidate for younger readers some of its references and allusions -- the H.M.S. Bounty sailing in jauntily under ''B Is for Breadfruit''; the oblique treatment of Thomas Jefferson; the classification of Carl ''L Is for'' Linnaeus, the proud papa of taxonomy, as ''notorious.'' Art collectors will pounce on the book for the rich contribution it makes to the continuum of Walker's work.
Playfulness, in its world, never comes without a price. Walker's opening illustration, a lacy ball of greenery and graphics, is not a toy; it's a declaration of intent, spelling out the book's subtitle. As an ''Alphabetary of the Colonized World,'' the book sets about peeling back botany to display the history behind it -- to reveal conquest as arrogant and destructive, economics as exploitation, the brutal privileges of slaveholding, the propagation of racial injustice. Plants are the pawns of trade routes and of encounters that don't end well for Indigenous peoples.
The book names names, including species' Latin nomenclatures, because Kincaid believes that the rigors of language as well as its profuse bounty have much to teach. Witness her own roots and cultivation: Born Elaine Potter Richardson in what was still the British colony of Antigua, she was sent by her family at 17 to work as an au pair in the United States, where she proceeded to launch herself on a singular trajectory that eventually deposited her at The New Yorker.
In illustrating Kincaid's fancifully wonky entries, Walker takes down a notch the natural-world metaphors of the monumental cut-paper silhouettes that brought her to prominence -- the ocean waves charting the Middle Passage; the pastoral Southern landscapes blooming with violence and violation; moonlit trees that are lynching posts.
Cunning and often anthropomorphic, the alphabet book's imagery interpolates child-driven versions of her acidly sardonic shadow art with soft-edged, watercolor-drenched vignettes that play hide-and-seek with the letters they're called on to represent. Sometimes, as with the burdens cotton placed on those shackled to an inhumane system, she lets subjects simply speak for themselves.
You can feel the nostalgic tug of precedents on the book. It places itself within the tradition of the pre-Raphaelites reanimating fairy tales and mythology for the Kelmscott Press, Salvador Dalí tackling ''Alice in Wonderland,'' Alexander Calder taking on Aesop.
In Kincaid's view, the elements of the past we miss or regret form a paradise we've been cast out of, by force or life's unforeseen circumstances -- an Edenic ideal that impels gardeners high and low to make their mark.
After all, as she reminds us in ''K Is for Kitchen Garden,'' the luxury of a just-because garden ''feeds and nourishes our souls and inspires us to think about 'things': the little doubts we harbor deep inside ourselves, our hatreds of others, our love of others, the many ways in which we can destroy and create the world and live with the consequences.''
The resemblance between Kincaid's own explosively colorful, emphatically personal Vermont garden and her distinctive writing style has been remarked upon. ''Her hundreds of plants,'' the critic Darryl Pinckney recently observed, ''are layered into a composition of informal design, expressive of her refined aesthetic and untroubled eccentricity.''
Sure enough, ''An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children'' has ideas looping hither and yon, the musicality of repetition, a generous embrace of idiosyncrasy, a punching up of symbolism.
Some of those redundancies and quirks might have benefited from pruning, and clarifying sunlight. As a collaboration, though, the book is charming and instructive. Kincaid and Walker are unafraid to spin the world differently and make it matter in new ways.
AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GARDENING FOR COLORED CHILDREN: An Alphabetary of the Colonized World | By Jamaica Kincaid. Illustrated by Kara Walker. | (Ages 8 and up) | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 96 pp. | $27
Celia McGee writes frequently about books and authors for The Times, and is a contributing reviewer for Air Mail.
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PHOTO: ''K Is for Kitchen Garden,'' from ''An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children.'' This article appeared in print on page BR26.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
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McGee, Celia. "How Did Our Gardens Grow?" The New York Times Book Review, 21 Apr. 2024, p. 26. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A790894958/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=84b38b3b. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.
Kincaid, Jamaica PUTTING MYSELF TOGETHER Farrar, Straus and Giroux (NonFiction None) $30.00 8, 5 ISBN: 9780374613235
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.
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"Kincaid, Jamaica: PUTTING MYSELF TOGETHER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A839213143/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=585ed566. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.
Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974-
Jamaica Kincaid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30 (352p)
ISBN 978-0-37-461323-5
* 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.)
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"Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974-." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 22, 2 June 2025, p. 75. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A842852875/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4fe85ebd. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.
Byline: Jess Row
Summing up her philosophy of writing in the introduction to "The Best American Essays 1995," Jamaica Kincaid wrote that an essay has "principles": "You state, you build on your statement, you sum up." But, she wondered, "how could I express any truth about myself or anything I might know in the form of state, build, and sum up when everything about me and everything I knew existed in a state of rage, rage, and more rage. I came into being in the colonial situation. It does not lend itself to any literary situation that is in existence."
Kincaid's life's work - not by design, but through a combination of fiery ambition and random luck - has been to create her own situation. Born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. John's, Antigua, in 1949, she was sent by her mother to work as an au pair in Scarsdale, New York, at the age of 16; within a few years she quit her job, changed her name, moved to New York City and found work as a freelance writer.
Through a series of happenstances, she befriended William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, and became one of the magazine's first Black staff writers, contributing unsigned Talk of the Town pieces that grew increasingly loose and improvisational. Kincaid eventually segued into fiction - first a book of short stories, "At the Bottom of the River," and then the novels that established her reputation in the 1980s and '90s: "Annie John," "Lucy," "The Autobiography of My Mother." During those same decades, she married William Shawn's son, the composer Allen Shawn, and moved with him to Bennington, Vermont, where she's lived ever since. She has also taught for many years at Harvard.
Kincaid's genius lies in the way she explicitly, unwaveringly foregrounds the facts of her life - that she's a Black immigrant from the Caribbean who has spent her entire adult life on intimate terms with an elite and rarefied sliver of White America. On the subjects of her childhood, Black popular culture and the experience of travel, Kincaid stands within the intensity and richness of the transnational Black experience; as an observer of White people in the United States and England, she specializes in prying away the surface normality to peer closely at what is underneath.
"Diana Ross was the special one," she wrote in the Village Voice in 1976. "Not only was she a young woman who conveyed the innocence of a girl, but she was a black person who had mastered, without the slightest bit of self-consciousness or embarrassment, being white. ... Black people always say that they have one face for white people and when they are by themselves they are real. I have never for a moment thought that there was a Diana Ross more real than the one I could see."
What stands out if you read many of her pieces at once - like the essays now collected in "Putting Myself Together," which stretch back more than 50 years - is the instantly recognizable quality of her sentences, which use repetition as a kind of accumulative force, declaring her intent to take up space on the page and in your mind. Here's a sentence about the walk to Robert Frost's house in Vermont: "Going backward, going back along the path that has become familiar in your mind's eye, especially if it has been a recent encounter, always seems unfamiliar and so even more frightening, for it should be familiar, but the way back is a new way too and will have its own pleasures and anxieties." Not every reader can tolerate that kind of prose, and critics have at times complained that Kincaid's work feels mannered, eccentric, even deliberately obscure. I admire it, and find it appropriate: There's a searching quality in Kincaid's writing that is commensurate with her lifelong desire to find a new form, and a new way of life, because the old ways make no sense to her.
This is not to say that "Putting Myself Together" is a completely rewarding book. For some reason - not explained anywhere I could find - Kincaid's Talk of the Town pieces from the New Yorker, which appeared as a separate book, "Talk Stories," in 2001, aren't reprinted here.
Instead, "Putting Myself Together" collects Kincaid's earliest non-New Yorker work up until 1978 and then leaps forward to 1989, when she was already a well-known novelist able to publish on any subject she wanted. It's an awkward arrangement, because the Talk of the Town pieces are such a pivotal part of the emergence of her voice and sensibility. Publishing the rest of her nonfiction this way might make "Putting Myself Together," which includes interviews and Kincaid's introductions to several books, among other things, seem like the outtakes and deleted tracks in a box set: for Kincaid completists only.
That's unfortunate, because only when you read "Putting Myself Together" and "Talk Stories" side by side can you see the complete evolution of Kincaid as an artist and a thinker. The Talk pieces are breezy and witty and acid-tongued, but what's most interesting about them is the dissonance between Kincaid's perspective and the staid personality of the magazine. It's only in longer essays that you begin to grasp her creative and intellectual range.
This is especially true on the subject of gardens and gardening, which has been the focus of her life since the late 1990s. The best piece in "Putting Myself Together," the one everyone must read, is the quietly incendiary "Sowers and Reapers," which begins with the story of how Kincaid offended Frank Cabot, the founder of the Garden Conservancy, at an event in Charleston, South Carolina, by pointing out that the famous gardens of the American South (most notably at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello) were built and maintained by enslaved people. As she writes, the smell of their flowers is "the sweet stench that makes up so much of American history." The essay ends with her, a Black woman, hiring White men in Vermont to build a large decorative wall for her own garden. "How glad was my spirit," Kincaid writes, "when, at the end of all this, Ron Pembroke presented me with a bill, and I in turn gave him a check for the complete amount, and there was nothing between us but complete respect and admiration and no feeling of the injustice of it all." She ends with a warning more potent now than when she wrote it in 2001: "The garden is not a place to lose your cares; the garden is not a place of rest and repose. Even God did not find it so."
It's this kind of meditation on the ironies and absurdities of a displaced life - a life she invented for herself, with no models - that makes Jamaica Kincaid so singularly important.
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Jess Row's most recent book is the novel "The New Earth" (2023). His new collection of short stories, "Storyknife," will be published in the summer of 2026.
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Putting Myself Together
Writing 1974-
By Jamaica Kincaid.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Washington Post
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Row, Jess. "'Putting Myself Together' displays Jamaica Kincaid's distinct gifts." Washington Post, 9 Aug. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A851025202/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cc91f07b. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.
Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974-. By Jamaica Kincaid. Aug. 2025. 352p. Farrar, $30 (9780374613235); e-book (9780374613242). 814.
Renowned for her fierce, lyrical, and droll fiction, Kincaid creates a collaged memoir of her nonfiction pieces from the past five decades, writings that first appeared in the New Yorker, Village Voice, Ms., New York Times, Architectural Digest, and literary journals. Henry Louis Gates Jr. introduces this assemblage of more than 50 essays about performers, literature, the West Indies, New York City, plants, and gardening, praising Kincaid's nonfiction as "serious and sarcastic" work that "conveys a powerful zest for living" as well as an intrepid devotion to truth-telling, however unnerving. Kincaid's mother is a formidable touchstone as Kincaid recounts her fractured childhood, leaving Antigua for the U.S. on her own as a teenager, and finding her way to writing. The repercussions of her displacement were compounded by her growing recognition of the indelible wounds of slavery and colonization in the Caribbean and the U.S., subjects that continually spark new insights, whether she's considering Diana Ross, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, daffodils, or a homemade yellow dress. Kincaid is an incisive, creative, lacerating, fearless, and sly extrapolator and an incantatory stylist. --Donna Seaman
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
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Seaman, Donna. "Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974-." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 22, Aug. 2025, pp. 23+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A857641515/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ef36dd3c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.