The Peepal Tree Book Of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories

Since its beginnings 33 years ago, Peepal Tree has published around 45 collections of Caribbean short stories, reinforcing the view that the short story is the Caribbean literary form par excellence. This anthology draws from those collections, plus a few guests, focusing on work written over the past twenty-five years, the majority dealing with the recent post-independence period up to the present. Though quality is the ultimate criteria, this anthology is unrivalled in its range across the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas, and representative of Caribbean ethnicities, gender and sexual orientations. Stories offer images of the city from ghettos to gated communities, suburbia, villages, the coastal margins. They display a range of contemporary concerns: social fragmentation, political corruption, sexual politics. They display a range of short story genres from satire, gritty realism, magical realism, fantasy, the gothic, the folkloric, horror, crime, erotica, flash fiction, the speculative... Whilst the stories in the anthology collectively offer an insightful picture of both the contemporary Caribbean and of the current status of the Caribbean short story as a form, the overall editorial aim has been to create a book that gives the reader a rich, varied and rewarding reading experience. The collection includes the work of, amongst others, Opal Palmer Adisa, Christine Barrow, Rhoda Bharath, Jacqueline Bishop, Hazel Campbell, Merle Collins, Cyril Dabydeen, Kwame Dawes, Curdella Forbes, Ifeona Fulani, Keith Jardim, Barbara Jenkins, Meiling Jin, Cherie Jones, Helen Klonaris, Sharon Leach, Alecia McKenzie, Sharon Millar, Anton Nimblett, Geoffrey Philp, Velma Pollard, Jennifer Rahim, Raymond Ramcharitar, Jacob Ross, Leone Ross, Olive Senior, Jan Shinebourne, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and N.D. Williams.

A pan-Caribbean anthology of original short stories culled from the winner and finalists of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

The short story has been integral to the development of Caribbean literature, and continues to offer possibilities for invention and reinvigoration. As the most comprehensive study of its kind, this important and timely volume explores the significance of the short story form to Caribbean cultural production across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The twenty original essays collected here offer a unique set of inquiries and insights into the historical, cultural and stylistic characteristics of Caribbean short story writing. The book draws together diverse critical perspectives from established and emerging scholars, including Shirley Chew, Alison Donnell, James Procter, Raymond Ramcharitar and Elaine Savory. Essays cover the publishing histories of specific islands; intersections of the local, global and diasporic; treatments of race and gender; language, orality and genre; and cultural contexts from tourism to calypso to cricket. Book jacket.

This book examines the representation of community in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short stories, focusing on the most recent wave of Anglophone Caribbean short story writers following the genre's revival in the mid-1980s. The first extended study of Caribbean short stories, it presents the phenomenon of interconnected stories as a significant feature of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Anglophone Caribbean literary cultures. Lucy Evans contends that the short story collection and cycle, literary forms regarded by genre theorists as necessarily concerned with representations of community, are particularly appropriate and enabling as a vehicle through which to conceptualise Caribbean communities. The book covers short story collections and cycles by Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, Alecia Mckenzie, Lawrence Scott, Mark McWatt, Robert Antoni and Dionne Brand, and argues that the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers' imagining of communities, which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of community, bringing literary representations of community into dialogue with models of community developed in the field of Caribbean anthropology. The works analysed are set in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana, and in several cases the setting extends to the Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America. Looking in turn at rural, urban, national and global communities, the book draws attention to changing conceptions of community around the turn of the millennium.

This book examines the various patterns of nominal and pronominal address used in Jamaica and Trinidad, the two most populous islands of the English-speaking Caribbean. Given that the Anglo-Caribbean context has so far been largely neglected in address research, this study aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the linguistic means Jamaicans and Trinidadians have at their disposal and make use of to address each other. A particular focus will be on variation in the speakers’ address behaviour with regard to their sex, age, social class, ethnicity, and regional background. The study draws both on data from a self-compiled corpus of postcolonial Jamaican and Trinidadian literary works, and on questionnaire and interview data collected during fieldwork. This book contributes to the ever-growing body of research in the field of nominal and pronominal address, and will be relevant to researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and World Englishes.

This anthology provides readers with a sampler of the energy, commitment, and sheer brilliance of a whole new generation of Caribbean writers.

The Caribbean is the source of one of the richest, most accessible, and yet technically adventurous traditions of contemporary world literature. This collection extends beyond the realm of English-speaking writers, to include stories published in Spanish, French, and Dutch. It brings together contributions from major figures such as V. S. Naipaul, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and work from the exciting new generation of Caribbean writers represented by Edwidge Danticat, and Jamaica Kincaid.

'Jacob Ross is a truly amazing writer. Black Rain Falling is an outstanding novel' BERNARDINE EVARISTO, WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 'Jacob Ross is a unique and thrilling new voice in crime fiction' MARK BILLINGHAM Delving into issues of family, class and loyalty, Black Rain Falling is a stunning crime novel that asks how far one should go to protect those they love. On the Caribbean island of Camaho, forensics expert Michael 'Digger' Digson is in deep trouble. His fellow CID detective Miss Stanislaus kills a man in self-defence - their superiors believe it was murder, and Digger given just six weeks to prove his friend is innocent. While the authorities bear down on them, Digger and Miss Stanislaus investigate a shocking roadside murder, the first tremors of a storm of crime and corruption that will break over Camaho at any moment.