If the measure of a writer’s success is the ire he provokes, then V.S. Naipaul is a spectacular success in Trinidad…. “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies,” Naipaul wrote in “The Middle Passage” (1962) — the first sign that he wasn’t going to play the proud [...]

Browsing through the current issue of the London Review of Books, I come across the following, in a review by Tony Wood of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms: Perhaps the most brilliant piece in ‘Sluchai’ is the pseudo-play ‘Pushkin and Gogol’. Gogol falls onto the stage from behind the curtain [...]

- In today’s Stabroek News, a substantial (though unsigned) obituary of the late Wordsworth McAndrew: With the onset of state-sponsored international cultural events such as the first Caribbean Festival of the Arts and with state control of radio broadcasting, there was much less space for McAndrew’s way of doing things. Independent and individualistic, he still [...]

In an average month, dozens of new Caribbean books arrive at the CRB office. Not all of them get reviewed in the magazine–too many books, not enough pages–and because we are a quarterly with a rather long lead time, sometimes months can pass between a book’s arrival and its appearance in our pages. Well, for [...]

The recent passing of two very different regional poets, offers an opportunity to consider the diminishing role of literary culture in the contemporary Caribbean…. The deaths of Aimé Césaire and Wordsworth McAndrew inspire an editorial in today’s Stabroek News about the role of literature in the contemporary Caribbean.