Ruel Johnson appeared on the Caribbean’s literary radar almost out of nowhere in 2002, when the manuscript of Ariadne and Other Stories won the Guyana Prize for Literature for best first book of fiction, and his unpublished poetry collection “The Enormous Night” was shortlisted for the best first book of poems award. He was only [...]

The current issue of the International Journal of Scottish Literature takes for its theme the topic of “Caribbean-Scottish passages”. The scholarly papers and other essays collected by editors Gemma Robinson (best known as a Martin Carter scholar) and Carla Sassi are drawn from a conference hosted a few months ago by the University of Stirling. [...]

The New York Review of Books–which has inspired dozens of other book-reviewing periodicals around the world, including, yes, the CRB–is forty-five years old. (See the anniversary issue online here; the entire first issue of the NYRB, dated 1 February, 1963, here.) Yesterday the San Francisco Chronicle ran a profile by Heidi Benson of the NYRB’s [...]

I missed choosing an Antilles book of the week last week, dear readers–I was distracted by the news of David de Caires’s death. And this week’s choice reminds me of another recent sad loss. E.A. Markham–Archie to his friends–died in March this year, just as his latest book was going to press. Against the Grain [...]

Pynter Bender, the new novel by Grenadian writer Jacob Ross, is turning some heads in the UK, where it was recently published. Reviewing it in the Independent, Kevin Le Gendre says Pynter Bender has “an epic grandeur that recalls Patrick Chamoiseau’s landmark 1992 novel Texaco.” Catherine Taylor, on the other hand, in her brief review [...]