In Jamaica Where I Live And Other Stories

“In these kaleidoscopic stories of Jamaica and its diaspora we hear many voices at once. All of them convince and sing. All of them shine.”—Zadie Smith An O: The Oprah Magazine “Top 15 Best of the Year” • A Well-Read Black Girl Pick Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret—Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life. In “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In “Mash Up Love,” a twin’s chance sighting of his estranged brother—the prodigal son of the family—stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In “Bad Behavior,” a couple leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In “Mermaid River,” a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In “The Ghost of Jia Yi,” a recently murdered student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in “Shirley from a Small Place,” a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother’s big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital. Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction’s most dynamic and essential authors. Praise for How to Love a Jamaican “A sublime short-story collection from newcomer Alexia Arthurs that explores, through various characters, a specific strand of the immigrant experience.”—Entertainment Weekly “With its singular mix of psychological precision and sun-kissed lyricism, this dazzling debut marks the emergence of a knockout new voice.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Gorgeous, tender, heartbreaking stories . . . Arthurs is a witty, perceptive, and generous writer, and this is a book that will last.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties “Vivid and exciting . . . every story rings beautifully true.”—Marie Claire

People (Volume 1) Jamaican topics covered in the book include our slave fore-fathers, our national heroes, our political and religious leaders, our educators, our youths, our nurses and doctors, our lawyers, our journalists and authors, our beauty queens, our talented athletes, our vendors, and our Jamericans and JAGlobians. Naturally, our multi-talented brothers and sisters are saluted including those still here and those who have since departed to the great beyond. So dear readers, enjoy the mind "triggers" and heart-wrenching "diggers" you will find in this book honouring the 55th year of celebrating Jamaica's independence and the tantalizing trip down memory lane with this unofficial reference/resource guide by your side.

Set in Canada and Jamaica in the 1960s, Karl is the story of a young man's encounter with middle-class Jamaica. His story is contrasted with Kenneth's, who rejects all that the middle class has to offer. Other stories in this book reflect the lives of women from different social backgrounds.

Until the nineteen sixties, proper young women were raised to remain virgins until marriage, to be good mothers and wives, and to depend on husbands for status and economic survival. With the feminist movement, women began to understand they could make decisions regarding their own destiny. Women liked it that they could be equal to men in domestic and public life. Many worked hard to earn that equality. Yet certain issues remain universal - love, controlling partners, career, motherhood and aging – subjects of the stories in this book. Equality, however, has brought its kinks to the story. Join author Barbara Wolfenden in The Accidental Jibe to explore how women might handle common and not-so-common problems. You will be surprised. “These relationship stories are fast-paced and written with beautiful language.” Judy Osborne, Author, Wisdom for Separated Parents: Rearranging Around the Children to Keep Kinship Strong (Praeger, 2011)

The author draws a parallel between Jamaican understandings of the self, and the late philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The ethnographic material presented here, derived from two years fieldwork in Kingston, suggest that Jamaicans understand themselves as global citizens. This sense of self can be identified across multiple contexts - oral performance, music, kinship and friendship, economics and politics. In light of Jamaican cultural experience, the book argues for a reframing of ethnographic practice as an explicitly cosmopolitan cultural practice."--BOOK JACKET.