"It started with a deep deep longing for home"

October 24, 2008

C.D. Valere of the Signifyn’ Guyana blog Many Antilles readers are also followers of Signifyin’ Guyana, the literary blog written by C.D. Valere (Charmaine to her friends), covering books and writers from Guyana and the wider Caribbean. I recently interviewed Charmaine, and our conversation is posted over at Global Voices today. Nicholas Laughlin: The obvious [...]

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Links, links, links

October 23, 2008

- At Signifyin’ Guyana, Charmaine Valere posts a short essay on Denise Harris’s novel Web of Secrets. – Geoffrey Philp describes his “quixotic” relationship with his alma mater, Jamaica College, and its influence on his world view and his fiction. – Tobias Buckell makes it clear that he’s not boycotting Borders. – The St Petersburg [...]

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A judge’s journal: part three

October 22, 2008

The Commonwealth of Nations (née British empire) is an association of more than fifty countries. One of the key things they have in common–a major legacy of onetime imperial rule–is the English language. Lord knows how many books of fiction are published in the entire Commonwealth each year (I’m sure Google knows too, but I’m [...]

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El biblioburro

October 21, 2008

In many parts of the world, mobile libraries–vehicles like buses or trailers, converted to store and transport books–bring reading material to people who would otherwise have no access to it. In northern Colombia, the region near the country’s Caribbean coast made famous in Gabriel García Márquez’s novels, a teacher named Luis Soriano has found his [...]

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Calabash tribute to Wayne Brown

October 20, 2008

The latest issue of the web journal Calabash is now online, dear readers (or at least I’ve just noticed it’s online). It opens with a tribute to Wayne Brown, the Trinidadian writer who has run an influential writing workshop in Jamaica for much of the last decade. The Calabash editors have collected stories and poems [...]

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Book of the week: The Changing Society of Tobago, 1838-1938, by Susan E. Craig-James

October 19, 2008

The new Antilles book of the week, dear readers, is The Changing Society of Tobago, 1838-1938, by Susan Craig-James–a massive social, economic, political, and cultural history of Tobago, published in two oversize volumes, for a total of more than seven hundred pages. It draws on over two decades of research, and offers an astonishing richness [...]

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Sunday links

October 19, 2008

- The Signifyin’ Guyana blog announces a new short story and poetry competition for “Guyanese writers living in Guyana as well as outside of Guyana”; details to come. – In the Kaieteur News, Petamber Persaud reviews Short and Sweet, a new collection of short fiction by Robert Fernandes (better known to most Guyanese for his [...]

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"Seek it in his poetry"

October 18, 2008

Césaire once quipped that anyone confused by his politics should seek it in his poetry. He seemed, at times, an advocate of poésie pure, a follower of Mallarmé’s craft of absence and elimination, especially in Les armes miraculeuses. But his poems also bear witness to the harsh realities of life in a colonial outpost under [...]

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Donald Locke: Ruby Garden

October 17, 2008

Ruby Garden (1994-2004, bronze with painted sticks) is one of the sculptures in Master Works/Recent Works, a show by the Guyanese artist Donald Locke which opened yesterday at the Skoto Gallery in New York. It runs until 22 November. Read a brief profile of Locke here (and take a look at The Kingdom of the [...]

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A judge’s journal: part two

October 16, 2008

I am old enough now to recognise that as I have grown older my reading habits have greatly changed. And I don’t mean just that I prefer different writers to the ones I admired (or adored!) when I was younger, or that I read more or less, more quickly or slowly, at different hours of [...]

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"It is never my own voice"

October 15, 2008

Vahni Capildeo, reading from her poems last night at the Reader’s Bookshop in Port of Spain, hosted by the CRB. Photo by Georgia Popplewell. See more photos of the event here.

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