Bøger af Jamaica Kincaid

Den caribiske teenagepige Lucy kommer til New York for at arbejde som au pair hjemme hos Lewis og Mariah og deres fire børn.Parret lever på over- fladen et velsignet liv, de er smukke, rige og fremstår glade. Men alligevel fornemmer Lucy fra starten revner i facaden. Med en blanding af vrede og medfølelse gransker Lucy fejlslutnin- ger og sandheder i sine arbejdsgiveres tilværelse og sammenligner dem med virkeligheden hvor hun kommer fra. Lucy har ingen illusioner om sin fortid, men er heller ikke indstillet på at blive ført bag lyset af den amerikanske drøm. Selv bærer Lucy på en fortælling om opbrud fra hjemmet og et stærkt ønske om at skabe sin egen skæbne – en fortælling som ingen andre end hun selv kender til. Lucy er en af Kincaids mest læste romaner, etstærkt og originalt portræt af en ung kvinde som opdager og opfinder sig selv.Lucy er smukt oversat af Camilla Christensen og udkom første gang på dansk i 1993.

Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador BooksIn this acclaimed travel memoir Jamaica Kincaid chronicles a spectacular and exotic three-week trek through the Himalayan land of Nepal, where she and her companions are gathering seeds for planting at home. The natural world and, in particular, plants and gardening are central to Kincaid's work. Among Flowers intertwines meditations on nature and stunning descriptions of the Himalayan landscape with observations on the ironies, difficulties and dangers of this magnificent journey.For Kincaid and three botanist friends, Nepal is a paradise, a place where a single day's hike can traverse climate zones, from subtropical to alpine, encompassing flora suitable for growing at their homes, from Wales to Vermont. Yet as she makes clear, there is far more to this foreign world than rhododendrons that grow thirty feet high. Danger, too, is a constant companion - and the leeches are the least of their worries. Unpredictable Maoist guerrillas live in these perilous mountains, and when they do appear - as they do more than once - their enigmatic presence lingers long after they have melted back into the landscape. And Kincaid, who writes of the looming, lasting effects of colonialism in her works, necessarily explores the irony of her status as memsahib with Sherpas and bearers.A wonderful blend of introspective insight and beautifully rendered description, Among Flowers is a vivid, engrossing, and characteristically frank memoir from one of the most striking voices in contemporary literature.Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best in modern literature.

Den caribiske teenagepige Lucy kommer til New York for at arbejde som au pair hjemme hos Lewis og Mariah og deres fire børn. Parret lever på overfladen et velsignet liv, de er smukke, rige og fremstår glade. Men alligevel fornemmer Lucy fra starten revner i facaden. Med en blanding af vrede og medfølelse gransker Lucy fejlslutninger og sandheder i sine arbejdsgiveres tilværelse og sammenligner dem med virkeligheden hvor hun kommer fra. Lucy har ingen illusioner om sin fortid, men er heller ikke indstillet på at blive ført bag lyset af den amerikanske drøm. Selv bærer Lucy på en fortælling om opbrud fra hjemmet og et stærkt ønske om at skabe sin egen skæbne – en fortælling som ingen andre end hun selv kender til. Lucy er en af Kincaids mest læste romaner, et stærkt og originalt portræt af en ung kvinde som opdager og opfinder sig selv.Lucy er smukt oversat af Camilla Christensen og udkom første gang på dansk i 1993.

Annie John er et lykkeligt, ubekymret barn på Antigua i Caribien. Som tiårig er hendes yndlingsbeskæftigelse at sidde og se på, mens hendes mor finder minderne frem fra den gamle kuffert som rummer hele hendes tilværelse. Men Annie er ikke ti år gammel for evigt. Hun forandres, og den kærlighed hun kendte i moderens omsorg bliver til modvilje og uforsonlighed. Annie John er et både smukt og smerteligt portræt af en ung piges opvækst, hendes længsel efter at finde og forstå sig selv, og en fortælling om det lille skridt fra kærlighed til afsky, som det kan udspille sig i en familie.

Moderrollen udforskes i en rå coming-of-age-fortælling, hvor en moderløs opvækst bliver selve livets præmis.Xuela Claudette Richardson mister sin mor i samme øjeblik, hun kommer til verden, og må derfor famle sig igennem tilværelsen uden den kvinde, hun deler navn med.Hun vokser op i et hjem, hvorfra hun kan høre bølgernes brusen, og under sin skolegang flytter hun ind i et værelse med bliktag i Jack LaBattes hus. Jack bliver hendes første elsker, og siden forelsker hun sig i stevedoren Roland, som stjæler irsk linned til hende fra de skibe, han aflæsser. Men i sidste ende gifter Xuela sig med den engelske læge, Philip Bailey.Xuelas verden er intenst sanselig med dufte af overmodne frugter, krystalviolet, svovl og regnvåde vejbaner, og den syder af Xuelas sorg over sin mor, frygt for sin far og en altomsluttende ensomhed. Og under alt andet løber den strøm, som Xuelas liv vugger på: moderløsheden og barnløsheden.Selvbiografien om min mor er en lyrisk fortælling om kærlighed og karakterdannelse og en meditation over livet og døden på øen Dominica.

Moderrollen udforskes i en rå coming-of-age-fortælling, hvor en moderløs opvækst bliver selve livets præmis.Xuela Claudette Richardson mister sin mor i samme øjeblik, hun kommer til verden, og må derfor famle sig igennem tilværelsen uden den kvinde, hun deler navn med.Hun vokser op i et hjem, hvorfra hun kan høre bølgernes brusen, og under sin skolegang flytter hun ind i et værelse med bliktag i Jack LaBattes hus. Jack bliver hendes første elsker, og siden forelsker hun sig i stevedoren Roland, som stjæler irsk linned til hende fra de skibe, han aflæsser. Men i sidste ende gifter Xuela sig med den engelske læge, Philip Bailey.Xuelas verden er intenst sanselig med dufte af overmodne frugter, krystalviolet, svovl og regnvåde vejbaner, og den syder af Xuelas sorg over sin mor, frygt for sin far og en altomsluttende ensomhed. Og under alt andet løber den strøm, som Xuelas liv vugger på: moderløsheden og barnløsheden.Selvbiografien om min mor er en lyrisk fortælling om kærlighed og karakterdannelse og en meditation over livet og døden på øen Dominica.

A startlingly beautiful novel about marriage by "one of our most scouringly vivid writers" (The New York Times Book Review).In See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid's brilliant and evocative novel, a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters-a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England-as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future: for, as she writes, "the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then." Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear.See Now Then is Kincaid's attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end.Over the past forty years of her career, Kincaid has demonstrated a unique talent for seeing beyond and through the surface of things. In See Now Then, she envelops the reader in a world that is both familiar and startling-creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet.

The "revelatory" (The New York Review of Books) story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home. Jamaica Kincaid's first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate chauffeur who makes his living along the wide, open roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air.As Mr. Potter's narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, damaged community. Amid his surroundings, he struggles to live at ease: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, and to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters-one of whom will return to Antigua after he dies and tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy.In Mr. Potter, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any other in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unexamined life.

Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a square plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced gardener friends, she planted only seeds of flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book):, she gathers all that she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it in the same spirit: generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination. Kincaid's affections are matched in intensity only by her dislikes. She loves spring and summer but cannot bring herself to love winter, for it hides the garden. She adores the rhododendron 'Jane Grant,' and appreciates ordinary Blue Lake string beans, but abhors the Asiatic lily and dreams of ways to trap small plant-eating animals. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where she grew up and where one of her favorite school subjects was botany, and she considers the implications of the English idea of the garden in colonized countries. On a trip to the Chelsea Flower Show, she visits historic English gardens on English soil. My Garden (Book): is an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the gardeners who tend them.

Jamaica Kincaid's collected writings for The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" record her first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York.Talk Stories is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town," composed during the time when she first arrived in the United States from Antigua, from 1978 to 1983. Kincaid developed a unique voice, both in sync with William Shawn's tone for the quintessential elite magazine and (though unsigned) all her own-wonderingly alive to the ironies and screwball details that characterized her adopted city. The book also reflects Kincaid's development as a young writer-the newcomer who sensitively records her impressions here takes root to become one of our most respected authors.

Finalist for the 1997 National Book Award for NonfictionJamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.

"In this modern-day abecedarium, Jamaica Kincaid shares her deep knowledge of plant history and nomenclature while writing about the intersections of the plant world with history, race, mythology, colonial appropriation, and independence. Accompanied by vivid, powerful illustrations by Kara Walker"--

Kincaid gathers a sparkling selection of new and beloved poetry and prose about each author's favorite flora. The passion for gardening and the passion for words come together in this inspired anthology, a collection of essays and poems on topics as diverse as beans and roses, by writers who garden and gardeners who write.Among the contributors are Daniel Hinkley on hellebores; Marina Warner, who remembers the Guinée rose; and Henri Cole, with the poems "Bearded Irises" and "Peonies." Ian Frazier pulls weeds in "Memories of a Press-Gang Gardener," and Michael Pollan defends a gothic cousin of the sunflower in "Consider the Castor Bean"; Ken Druse stalks the sexy jack-in-the-pulpit, and Elaine Scarry contemplates steep slopes of columbine. Most of the pieces are new, but Colette, Katharine S. White, William Carlos Williams, and several other old favorites also make appearances.Jamaica Kincaid, the much admired writer and a passionate gardener herself, has assembled this diverse crew and provides a spirited introduction. A wonderful gift for green thumbs, My Favorite Plant is a happy collection of fresh takes on old friends.

Kincaid's first book, which announced the arrival of a singular talent, "will burn on your shelf" (Derek Walcott).Reading Jamaica Kincaid is to plunge gently into another way of seeing both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her voice is, by turns, naively whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partly remembered, partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean-family, manners, and landscape-as distilled and transformed by Kincaid's special style and vision.Kincaid leads her readers to consider, as if for the first time, the powerful ties between mother and child; the beauty and destructiveness of nature; the gulf between the masculine and the feminine; the significance of familiar things-a house, a cup, a pen. Transfiguring our human form and our surroundings-shedding skin, darkening an afternoon, painting a perfect place-these stories tell us something we didn't know, in a way we hadn't expected.Originally published in 1978, Jamaica Kincaid's first book immediately established her as an inimitable, vibrant, and hauntingly beautiful voice in contemporary literature.

The essential, urgent coming-of-age novel by Jamaica Kincaid, a reinventor of the form.Since her first, prizewinning collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid's work has been met with nothing short of amazement. The New York Times hailed her "prophetic power" and the Los Angeles Times Book Review said, "No one else seems to be writing quite this way."With Annie John, the story of a young girl coming of age in Antigua, Kincaid tore open the theme that lies at the heart of her fierce, incantatory novels: the ambivalent and essential bonds created by a mother's love. In this book, written in Kincaid's lucid, elemental style, Annie John's ambivalence is universally familiar and wrenchingly real.

Originally featured in the New Yorker's 'Talk of the Town' column, these are Jamaica Kincaid's first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York.

A story of a marriage, Jamaica Kincaid's See Now Then is one of her most emotionally and thematically daring works.

One of the most important literary voices of the twentieth century on one of her greatest loves - gardening.

Jamaica Kincaid's poetic and affecting story of an ordinary man attempting to make a home on the island of Antigua.

Jamaica Kincaid's poweful and moving account of the life and death of her younger brother.

In this travel memoir, the acclaimed novelist Jamaica Kincaid chronicles a three-week trek through Nepal, the spectacular and exotic Himalayan land, where she and her companions are gathering seeds for planting at home. The natural world and, in particular, plants and gardening are central to Kincaid's work; in addition to such novels as Annie John and Lucy, Kincaid is the author of My Garden (Book): a collection of essays about her love of cultivating plants and gardens throughout her life. Among Flowers intertwines meditations on nature and stunning descriptions of the Himalayan landscape with observations on the ironies, difficulties, and dangers of this magnificent journey.For Kincaid and three botanist friends, Nepal is a paradise, a place where a single day's hike can traverse climate zones, from subtropical to alpine, encompassing flora suitable for growing at their homes, from Wales to Vermont. Yet as she makes clear, there is far more to this foreign world than rhododendrons that grow thirty feet high. Danger, too, is a constant companion-and the leeches are the least of the worries. Unpredictable Maoist guerillas live in these perilous mountains, and when they do appear-as they do more than once-their enigmatic presence lingers long after they have melted back into the landscape. And Kincaid, who writes of the looming, lasting effects of colonialism in her works, necessarily explores the irony of her status as memsahib with Sherpas and bearers.A wonderful blend of introspective insight and beautifully rendered description, Among Flowers is a vivid, engrossing, and characteristically frank memoir from one of our most striking voices.

The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected--and most popular--of its kind. The Best American Travel Writing 2005 includes William Least-Heat Moon • Ian Frazier • John McPhee • William T. Vollmann • Simon Winchester • Tom Bissell • Madison Smartt Bell • Timothy Bascom • Pam Houston • and othersJamaica Kincaid, guest editor, is the author of numerous award-winning works, including the memoirs My Brother and The Autobiography of My Mother and the novel Annie John. Her travelogue Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas appeared in 2005. She lives in Vermont with her two children and a garden, in which she travels a great deal.

From "The Talk of the Town," Jamaica Kincaid's first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New YorkTalk Pieces is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town," composed during the time when she first came to the United States from Antigua, from 1978 to 1983. Kincaid found a unique voice, at once in sync with William Shawn's tone for the quintessential elite insider's magazine, and (though unsigned) all her own--wonderingly alive to the ironies and screwball details that characterized her adopted city. New York is a town that, in return, fast adopts those who embrace it, and in these early pieces Kincaid discovers many of its hilarious secrets and urban mannerisms. She meets Miss Jamaica, visiting from Kingston, and escorts the reader to the West Indian-American Day parade in Brooklyn; she sees Ed Koch don his "Cheshire-cat smile" and watches Tammy Wynette autograph a copy of Lattimore's Odyssey; she learns the worlds of publishing and partying, of fashion and popular music, and how to call a cauliflower a crudite.The book also records Kincaid's development as a young writer--the newcomer who sensitively records her impressions here takes root to become one of our most respected authors.

An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived a peaceful and content life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful and influential presence, who sits at the very centre of the little girl's existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother's shadow.When she turns twelve, however, Annie's life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she makes rebellious friends and frequently challenges authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing Annie as a 'young lady', ceases to be the source of unconditional adoration and takes on the new and unfamiliar guise of adversary.A haunting and tragicomic tale of the end of childhood, Annie John is told with Jamaica Kincaid's trademark candour and complexity, and is a true coming-of-age classic.

Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. At first glance Lewis and Mariah are a blessed couple - handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Almost at once, however, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade.With a mixture of anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the privileged, facile world of her employers while comparing it to the vivid realities of her home in the Caribbean. Lucy has no illusions about her own past, but neither is she prepared to be deceived about where she presently is.In this environment a new person unfolds: passionate, sexually forthright, and disarmingly honest. In Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid has created a startling new character: a captivating heroine possessed with clear-sightedness and ferocious integrity.Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.

At the Bottom of the River is Jamaica Kincaid's first published work, a selection of inter-connected prose poems told from the perspective of a young Afro-Caribbean girl.Collecting pieces written for the New Yorker and the Paris Review between 1978 and 1982, including the seminal 'Girl', these stunning works announced a fully-formed, generational talent and firmly established the themes that Kincaid would continue to return to in her later work: the loss of childhood, the fractious nature of mother-daughter relationships, the intangible beauty of the natural world, and the striving for independence in a colonial landscape.Powerful and lyrical, this is an unforgettable collection from a unique and necessary literary voice.Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.