Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult...

"... chronicles a three-week trek through Nepal, the spectacular and exotic Himalayan land where she and her companions seek to gather seeds for planting at home"--Jacket.

Xuela Claudette Richardson grows up in the care of her father's laundress obsessed with trying to piece together a portrait of her Carib mother who died at the moment of Xuela's birth.

Bringing together reporting, profiles, memoir and criticism from The New Yorker to present a bold and complex portrait of black life in America, told through stories of private triumphs and national tragedies, political vision, and artistic inspiration throughout history.