No. 15 • February 2008
Image above: Detail of Doce cuchillos (Twelve Knives) (1983), by José Braulio Bedia Valdés; mixed media on cardboard, 30 x 20 inches; courtesy the artist and Patricia and Howard Farber
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Wonder boy
Marlon James on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz
What Vidia saw
Brendan de Caires on A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, by V.S. Naipaul
Soul stories
Melanie Archer on The Storyteller, by Roberta Stoddart
Second coming
Jeremy Taylor on Che in Verse, ed. Gavin O’Toole and Georgina Jiménez
Black rain
Annie Paul on The Rainmaker’s Mistake, by Erna Brodber
The lives of others
Melissa Richards on Four Taxis Facing North, by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw
Brotherhood of the boat
John T. Gilmore on The First Crossing, Being the Diary of Theophilus Richmond
Outside in
Nicholas Laughlin on Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, ed. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz
IN BRIEF
• Robert Edison Sandiford on Chameleon and Other Stories, by Jane Bryce
• Dylan Kerrigan on Indo-Caribbean Indenture: Resistance and Accommodation, 1938–1920, by Lomarsh Roopnarine
• Andre Bagoo on Walking, by Joanne Haynes
ALSO NOTED
Other new and recent books
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The 2007 CRB books of the year
The CRB’s editors recommend nine stand-out books from last year
READING LIST
Into the wild
CONVERSATION
“I’m my own fukú”
Junot Díaz talks to Giselle Rodriguez Cid about his literary alter egos and following Dominican literature online
FICTION
Maria-Teresa and Janchi
An excerpt from the novel A Stranger on Earth, by Boeli van Leeuwen, trans. Olga E. Rojer and Joseph O. Aimone
NOTEBOOK
• Kei Miller on being, or not being, a slam poet
• Tobias S. Buckell on being, if not looking, Caribbean
PORTFOLIO
• La Fantasie, by Marlon Griffith, Jaime Lee Loy, and Nikolai Noel
• Cuba Avant-Garde, at the Harn Museum of Art
POEMS
• Prometheus, by Ishion Hutchinson
• Waiting for Rain, by Tanya Shirley
• On Not Writing As a West Indian Woman, by Vahni Capildeo
