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Revolution Books, a community driven indie bookstore, successfully raised more than their $30,000 fundraising goal over the summer, in a fight to keep its West 26th Street location in Manhattan. Their outreach efforts helped the store raise $32,299, and they raised it just before their deadline.

To raise the money, the store did a lot of outreach and fundraising including hosting a benefit author series called, “Hidden Lives, Human Possibilities: Authors Present to Save Revolution Books.” Authors Edwidge Danticat, Walter Mosley,  and Henry Wiencek participated. The events brought in $1,800-$2,500 each. A book sale raised $1200.

Here is more from the store’s email newsletter:

But even with all that, by mid-September, the tally was still at $12,000 — with two weeks left till the deadline to raise $30,000. Where would the rest of it come from? The staff and volunteers stepped up calling, emailing, Face-booking and tweeting potential supporters and talking to everyone who came in the store. Right about then, a $10,000 donation came in from someone who had never contributed to the bookstore before. This put the goal well within range, brought in more donations, small and large, including one for almost $4000, which took the total to $32,299 by midnight on September 30.

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Author Claire Vaye Watkins won the $20,000 Story Prize for Battleborn, a short story collection that spanned from the California gold rush to contemporary times.

The other finalists for the prize were Dan Chaon (for Stay Awake) and Junot Diaz (for This Is How You Lose Her).  They each received $5,000. Here’s more from the release:

Ms. Watkins is the ninth-ever winner of The Story Prize and the first woman to win the prestigious book award since Mary Gordon took the top prize for The Stories of Mary Gordon in 2007. The first woman to take the top prize was Edwidge Danticat for The Dew Breaker in 2005.

(Photo via Lily Glass)

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There's a funny thing that happens when you stop writing your own books—when you cool the fever, when you walk the garden, when you do not rise at 3 AM, determined.  Other people's books become your obsession.  Their stories, their words, their worlds.  You grow responsible for understanding.  You yield your empathy, devote your time.  The days are long and hot and languid, and New Orleans wafts by courtesy of Ruta Sepetys, and Haiti, thanks to Edwidge Danticat, and the humor of Haven Kimmel, the confessions of Caroline Knapp, the daughter of a salt god (Ilie Ruby), Cambodia at war (Vaddey Ratner), the very secret life of objects (Dawn Raffel).

Over the course of the last month, I have bought nearly 100 books and others, due out soon, have made their way to me, courtesy of publishing houses and authors.  My triple-stacked shelves in every book-devoted room are officially overtaxed.  Book piles approximate architecture.  Most women get up and ask, What will I wear?  I wonder, upon rising, what to read.

My mind is clear; it is at peace; it is satiated.  I sleep better than I did.  I want less.  I am comforted by books, comfortable around them, and the words I do write these days are reviews and essays, opinion pieces, suggestions.  Short pieces, perhaps 1,000 words a day, that help me put into context those things that I'm learning about language and how it works for others.

It seems enough, for summer.

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Saturday night, a young woman I'll call E. returned from her year in Port-au-Prince, where she had been at work in a hospital clinic as a nutrition program coordinator.  Daughter of remarkably loving parents, sister to an incredibly talented and goodhearted son, E. is also a member of my church family (she is as well a super-star athlete, but that's a tale for another day).  We were all collectively holding our breath until E. arrived home safely.  We knew how much good she was doing over there.  We equally recognized that Haiti is not the easiest domicile for a recent college grad.

In honor of E.'s safe return home, I read Brother, I'm Dying, the Edwidge Danticat memoir.  The book had been sitting here for quite some time.  Having finished it this morning, I can neither understand nor forgive my earlier resistance to it.

For this is a book.  This is memoir at its most pure and form-redeeming—intelligent, researched, heartfelt.  Calmly and with great care, Danticat weaves together the story of the man who raised her as a child in Bel Air, Haiti (her uncle), and the man who fled to Brooklyn in an effort to create for his whole family a better life (her father).  Two brothers, then, two father figures, and two ultimately tragic trajectories as each man fights to survive impossible odds and their daughter fights hard not to lose them.  In a single year—2004—Danticat, now married, in Miami, pregnant with her daughter—will watch her world unravel.  She will bear witness to what revolutionary upheaval and disease can do to the men who, for so much of her youth, were not just essential but invincible.

Memoirs that make room for family history and country politics challenge their writers structurally; they ask more from the words on the page.  No false binding will do, no obvious superimpositions, no easy themes, no ready truths.  There are higher stakes, in memoirs like these.  More is expected, more wanted.  Danticat, who has proven herself in book after book, forges a remarkable narrative.  She is there throughout, of course; memoir by definition is an "I story.  But she is not her memoir's heroine; she is its maker, and there's a difference.  She has set out to honor others, not to claim pity for herself.  She has written with both intimacy and something I can only call nobility.  She has made of fragments a whole.  We believe her, utterly, when she writes these words:

I write these things now, some as I witnessed them and today remember them, others from official documents, as well as the borrowed recollections of family members.  But the gist of them was told to me over the years, in part by my uncle Joseph, in part by my father.  Some were told offhand, quickly.  Others, in greater detail.  What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments.  This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time.  I am writing this only because they can't.

I am writing this only because they can't.  Those who dismiss memoir as a genre have not read Brother, I'm Dying. 

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When my American Express bill came in this past month, something odd and spectacularly unprecedented occurred: I owed a mere ninety-nine cents.  True, I have been so holed up here, so focused on work, that I've been operating as a blinkered horse, my eyes on the finish line (s), my mind shutting out all purchase-able distractions.  Also true: Except when it comes to buying gifts (I buy many, many gifts) I have never been exactly profligate.  Malls drive me batty.  Excess crowds me in.  My decorating aesthetic is whatever lies between homey and uncluttered, warm and just enough.  My wardrobe features three pairs of jeans, some turtlenecks, some sweaters/coats, an occasional skirt, and some dresses, for when I have to wear dresses.  My mother used to buy me my most interesting, most meaningful clothes.  She passed away several years ago, and I never rose to the challenge.

(I do like shoes.  By my count, I have too many shoes.)

Still, what I do buy is books—I buy a lot of books—in support of an industry, in specific support of specific authors.  Thus, I rectified my no-buying spree yesterday by adding a number of titles to my personal library, all of them, I realize, falling into the nonfiction camp.  That's nonfiction the way I define it, and not the way John D'Agata wishes I would.  (For more on the D'Agata controversy, I suggest you read the Gideon Lewis-Kraus RIFF in the New York Times.) 

Among the titles that will (at one point) be reported on here are the following:

Rough Likeness: Essays (Lia Purpura)
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Edwidge Danticat)
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity (Katherine Boo)
Winter: Five Windows on the Season (Adam Gopnik)
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Anthony Shadid)
Istanbul: Memories and the City (Orhan Pamuk)
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Orhan Pamuk)

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Edwidge Danticat, illustrated by Alix Delinois,
Eight Days: A Story of Haiti
Orchard Books, 2010.

Ages 5-11

When a devastating earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, Haiti-born author Edwidge Danticat struggled to find a way to help her daughters make sense of it.  In her Author’s Note at the end of the book, she explains that she wrote Eight Days: A Story of Haiti as a response to her five-year-old daughter’s concerns: “I carefully told her about a few people, among them some children, who had been miraculously rescued.”  The result is this story of a young boy who is rescued after being trapped for eight days, during which hope, luck and his memories and imagination all play a part in his survival.

The story begins with the boy’s rescue – the accompanying illustration of an apparently international press pack gets the point across that his survival is newsworthy.  The questions asked will resonate with young readers: “Were you afraid?  Were you sad?  Did you cry?” The boy’s response forms the framework of the story, as he relates one activity/memory for each day.  This device is the perfect vehicle to show how he and his friend Oscar used the power of their imaginations to separate themselves from the reality of their situation: but it also allows the blur between imagination and reality to come through in the narrative.  So, for example, they spend Day 5 playing soccer with their friends.  “Oscar felt really tired and went to sleep.  He never woke up. That was the day I cried.” Or again, on Day 6, he is in the countryside playing with his sister and getting “soaking wet and muddy”, catching “a mouthful of rain”…

Illustrator Alix Delinois, who was also born in Haiti, brings the boy’s imaginings to life.  His palette of almost overpoweringly bright colours conveys the hyper-reality of his memories of what are, after all, very real people and events.  This interplay between the boy’s imagination and his physical situation allows Eight Days to be absorbed and pondered by young children at just that age when awareness of the human cost of natural disaster is dawning; and it also makes it a good book to read with older children.  This is a book for sharing.  It will raise plenty of questions, as well as perhaps the need for reassurance, and some searching of young readers’ own imaginations.

Marjorie Coughlan
October 2011

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Educator and author Ashley Hope Perez put together this great guest post for Color Online earlier in the year. I decided to rerun for Caribbean Heritage Month.

Reading Women Writers of the Caribbean

There’s more to Caribbean literature than the (wonderful) well-known works like A Simple Habana Melody and In the Time of the Butterflies.

Come with me to discover the texts I teach as part of my college class on women writers of the Caribbean. These titles are not to be missed! I’ll discuss them, not in order of publication, but in the order in which I teach them.

“A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua). This piece is the first text I introduce students to. I start here because Kincaid issues a forceful critique against tourism, and I want to challenge my students to find ways of reading that go beyond literary tourism. This is our starting place for discussions of the connections between reading and ethics. The text often makes readers feel guilty, angry, and uncomfortable. We talk about why.

Prospero’s Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez (Trinidad). This is a fascinating adaptation and retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This is the first novel I teach in the course because Nunez’s critique of colonialism, valorization of the local and (re)appropriation of a master plot by a white writer are features that are pretty plain to students. This is what I call an “apprenticeship” novel that helps sensitize students to themes that they’ll encounter (more subtly) in subsequent novels.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe). Here, Condé puts Tituba, a marginal historical figure from the Salem witch trials, on center stage, tracing her travels from the Caribbean to New England and back again. In addition to her reclamation of and play with the Salem history, Condé incorporates a cameo appearance by Hester Prynne of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, changing Hester’s fate in the retelling. Check out this blog for a subtle reading of I, Tituba

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Dominica). This classic of Caribbean literature offers yet another instance of rewriting canonical texts, for it imagines the pre-history of the Bertha character (the madwoman in the attic) fr

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Educator and debut author Ashley Hope Perez was kind enough to agree to do a guest post on Women Writers of the Caribbean

Reading Women Writers of the Caribbean

There’s more to Caribbean literature than the (wonderful) well-known works like A Simple Habana Melody and In the Time of the Butterflies.

Come with me to discover the texts I teach as part of my college class on women writers of the Caribbean. These titles are not to be missed! I’ll discuss them, not in order of publication, but in the order in which I teach them.

“A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua). This piece is the first text I introduce students to. I start here because Kincaid issues a forceful critique against tourism, and I want to challenge my students to find ways of reading that go beyond literary tourism. This is our st arting place for discussions of the connections between reading and ethics. The text often makes readers feel guilty, angry, and uncomfortable. We talk about why.



Prospero’s Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez (Trinidad). This is a fascinating adaptation and retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This is the first novel I teach in the course because Nunez’s critique of colonialism, valorization of the local and (re)appropriation of a master plot by a white writer are features that are pretty plain to students. This is what I call an “apprenticeship” novel that helps sensitize students to themes that they’ll encounter (more subtly) in subsequent novels.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe). Here, Condé puts Tituba, a marginal historical figure from the Salem witch trials, on center stage, tracing her travels from the Caribbean to New England and back again. In addition to her reclamation of and play with the Salem history, Condé incorporates a cameo appearance by Hester Prynne of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, changing Hester’s fate in the retelling. Check out this blog for a subtle reading of I, Tituba



Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Dominica). This classic of Caribbean literature offers yet another instance of rewriting canonical texts, for it imagines the pre-history

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I am currently reading In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez and loving it. When I found out it was the first book selected for the new Algonquin Book Club, I decided to finally pick it up. Some novels are classics for a reason, In the Time of Butterflies is one of them. Looking forward to watching out the book club webcast, author Edwidge Danticat interviews Julia Alvarez about In the Time of Butterflies. The event was held at a Miami bookstore and sold out, 250 tickets.

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Alqonquin Books is launching a new book club series beginning March 21.

We’ll be featuring four Algonquin Book Club selections a year for dynamic literary events held around the country and simultaneously webcast on our site. For each event, an Algonquin author will be interviewed by a notable writer.

I am mentioning the book club at Color Online because in this inaugural year two of four books are written by female authors of color. Its not often that women authors of color make up fifty percent.

March 21 Julia Alvarez (In the Time of the Butterflies) interviewed by Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I’m Dying

April 26 Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants) interviewed by Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help
August 18 Heidi Durrow (The Girl Who Fell from the Sky) interviewed by Terry McMillan, author of Getting to Happy

October 20 Robert Goolrick (A Reliable Wife) interviewed by Patricia Cornwell, author of Port Mortuary

Anyone who has read In the Time of Butterflies is encourged to Join the Conversation.

Want to chat with other readers about In the Time of the Butterflies? Each week, we’ll be giving away Algonquin Book Club tote bags, autographed Julia Alvarez books, Advance Review Copies, brand new titles hot off the press, and other swag to people who join in the conversation by:

Posting comments on the In the Time of the Butterflies discussion section on our Facebook page.
Sharing thoughts on Twitter using #AlgBookClub.

Contributing feedback to our In the Time of the Butterflies book club discussion blog posts leading up to the event.

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Algonquin Books has launched the Algonquin Books Club. The publisher has chosen twenty-five paperback titles from its list, building a readers guide for each book.

Here’s more from the site: “We’ll be featuring four Algonquin Book Club selections a year for dynamic literary events held around the country and simultaneously webcast on our site. For each event, an Algonquin author will be interviewed by a notable writer.”

The first event (March 21st) will be held in Miami at Books & Books. Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I’m Dying, will interview Julia Alvarez on her masterpiece, In the Time of the Butterflies. Below we’ve listed the rest of Algonquin Book Club’s 2011 event offerings.

continued…

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Eight Days (A Story of Haiti) by Edwidge Danticat (Illustrated by Alix Delinois)

Reviewed by: Chris Singer

About the author:

Edwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and moved to the United States when she was twelve years old. She published her first pieces of literary work just two years later. Edwidge has written many award-winning books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory (an Oprah’s Book Club Selection); Krik? Krak! (a National Book Award finalist); The Farming of Bones (an American Book Award winner); and Brother, I’m Dying (a National Book Critics Circle Award winner). She was a 2009 MacArthur Fellow. Edwidge lives with her family in Miami, Florida.

About the illustrator:

Alix Delinois was born in Saint Marc, Haiti and moved to Harlem with his family when he was seven years old. He recently illustrated Walter Dean Myer’s stunning biography of Muhammad Ali. He received his BFA in illustration from Pratt Institute in 2003 and a Master’s degree in Art Education in 2009. He lives and works in New York City.

About the book:

Highly acclaimed author Edwidge Danticat elegantly tells us the story of Junior, a seven-year-old boy trapped beneath his house after the Port-au-Prince earthquake, and his joyous rescue. Junior’s sparkling imagination helps him find the strength to survive.

My take on the book:

Eight Days tells the story of Junior, a seven-year-old boy trapped beneath his house after the Port-au-Prince earthquake. After Junior is rescued, everyone asks him how he survived. His answer: “I was brave, I told them, but when the earth shook again and again, I was afraid. And sometimes I cried, because I missed Manman and Papa and my little sister, Justine. But in my mind, I played.”

Junior’s imagination helps him survive and pass the time of those eight days by revisiting scenes of playing marbles and hide-and-seek with his friends, helping Papa sweep up the hair in his barbershop, and fulfilling his dream of singing a choir solo in church. Most of the days depict Junior having fun with his siblings and best friend Oscar. That is until the fifth day when Oscar goes to sleep and never wakes up. “That was the day I cried” says Junior, and I cried along with him in one of the more poignant moments in the book.

The accompanying illustrations throughout the story by Alix Delinois are incredibly beautiful and vivid, much like Junior’s imagination. For me, I was most struck by the artwork first before even reading the words. There&rsq

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Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat
"In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus lecture Create Dangerously, and combining memoir and essay, Danticat tells the stories of artists, including herself who create despite or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them."

The above is from the inside flap and truly captures what this book is about. Danticat opens with the 1964 public execution in Haiti, under dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier of two artist, Marcel Numa, Louis Drouin. The author quickly establishes that some artist risk their lives to create and speak in a hostile environment. This work addresses the role immigrant artist must play for their birth countries that suffer from censorship and unjust rule. We learn about many Haitian artist. Some who gave hope and inspiration, others who were exiled or murdered. Danticat tells us about Jean Dominque, a journalist who spent his life speaking out against the government and was assassinated. Sharing stories and memories, Danticat makes Dominque real.

"During the dictatorship in the early 1960's, a young Jean had created a cinema club, hosting weekly screenings at the Alliance Francaise in Port-au-Prince. There he showed films such as Federico Fellini's La Strada, which is, among other things, about a girl's near enslavement as a circus performer. "If you see a good film correctly" Jean said, "the grammar of that film is a political act. Everytime you see Fellini's La Strada, even if there is no question of fascism, of politcal persecution, you feel something against the black part of life." Another favorite of his was the Alian Resnais documentary Night and Fog, which describes the horrors of concentration camps. "To us, Auschwitz was Fort Dimanche," he said, referring to the Duvalier-era dungeonlike prison where thousands of Haitians were tortured and killed."

Danticat's writing is inviting, beautiful and honest. At times I felt the author shared more then she probably thought she would. Create Dangerously is a very powerful read. Read an excerpt

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