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Book

Putting myself together : writing 1974-

Call Number

  • 818 K512 (CEN, EAS, OSH)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.

Physical Description

xviii, 315 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Summary

"A collection of the inimitable writer's essays, stories, and articles from her early days at The Village Voice through her time at The New Yorker "-- Provided by publisher.

"'My ignorance was on my side. I wasn't afraid. I didn't know what to be afraid of. I did one thing, I did another. I did what I now call crashing about. One day I started to write.' This collection of Jamaica Kincaid's nonfiction writing, including early pieces from publications such as The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and Ms., proves what her admirers have always known: from the start, she has been a consummate stylist, and she has always been herself. From Jamaica Kincaid's New York, which narrates her move to the city from Antigua at the age of sixteen and a half, to the classic Biography of a Dress, her cultural criticism, and her original thinking about the meaning of the garden, Kincaid writes about the world as she finds it, imparting her own quizzical, rapier-sharp response to whatever crosses her path. 'Putting Myself Together' is a brilliant, trenchant, hilarious self-portrait of the artist and a testament to how this inimitable, self-created mind and spirit, endowed with wit, humor, and fearlessness, has become one of our greatest, most original writers." --

Contents

  • Introduction / The triumph of bad and cool (1974)
  • Erotica! (1975)
  • If mammies ruled the world (1975)
  • Pam Grier (1975)
  • The Labelle hustle (1975)
  • Last of the black white girls (1976)
  • Jamaica Kincaid's New York (1977)
  • Antigua crossings (Fiction) (1978)
  • Ovando (Fiction) (1989)
  • Athol Fugard (Interview by Jamaica Kincaid) (1990)
  • The finishing line (Fiction) (1990)
  • Foreword to 'Babouk: Voices of Resistance' (1991)
  • On seeing England for the first time (1991)
  • Biography of a dress (1992)
  • An Antiguan election journal (1994)
  • Christmas pictures from a warm climate (1994)
  • Introduction to 'The Best American Essays, 1995'
  • The little revenge from the periphery (1997)
  • Introduction to 'Generations of Women' (1998)
  • Introduction to 'My Favorite Plant' (1998)
  • Introduction to 'Poetics of Place' (1998)
  • Looking at Giverny (1998)
  • Those words that echo... echo... echo through life (1999)
  • Islander once, now a voyager (2000)
  • Sowers and reapers (2001)
  • Her best friend provokes her to write about her garden (2002)
  • Splendor in the glass (2002)
  • The garden of the year just passed (2002)
  • The lure of the poppy (2002)
  • Gardening (2003)
  • Living history in Vermont (2003)
  • Desert blooms (2004)
  • Jumby Bay (2004)
  • Introduction to 'The Best American Travel Writing, 2005'
  • Formal meets folly (2005)
  • Foreword to Ian Frazier's 'Gone to New York' (2006)
  • Captain's farm (2006)
  • Foreword to Alexandre Dumas's 'Georges' (2007)
  • Dances with daffodils (2007)
  • Her infinite variety (2008)
  • The estrangement (2009)
  • Lack, Part two (2009)
  • Tide (2011)
  • Introduction to Simone Schwarz-Bart's 'The Bridge of Beyond' (2013)
  • The kind of gardener I am not (2018)
  • The walk to Robert Frost's house (2019)
  • A letter to Robinson Crusoe (2019)
  • I see the world (2020)
  • Inside the American snow dome (2020)
  • I was never really making a garden so much as having a conversation (2020)
  • The disturbances of the garden (2020).

Subjects

Added Authors

Henry Louis Gates