A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICKWINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDOne of the Best Books of the Year NPR, Time, Esquire, BuzzFeed, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Milwaukee Journal SentinelA romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends. A marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences. A young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for … consequences. A young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival. Two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives. A baby’s christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new. A man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose.
Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, here are eight emotionally absorbing stories, rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity. At once wide in scope and intimate, Everything Inside explores with quiet power and elegance the forces that pull us together or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.
“Haunting, profound—an answered prayer for those who have long treasured [Danticat’s] essential contributions to the Caribbean literary canon.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“A beautiful book. . . . Danticat’s birthplace, Haiti, emerges in an almost mythic fashion. . . . She has curated this slim volume, bringing its elements together to create a satisfying whole.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A master of the short story form. . . . In these eight narratives of unexpected romance, personal tragedy, and family complications, Danticat’s compassionate sensitivity to the ties that bind us shines through.” —Esquire
Immensely rewarding. . . . Clear-eyed . . . gorgeous. . . . A stunning collection that features some of the best writing of Danticat’s brilliant career.” —NPR
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I do not usually reach for short stories, as I find that they lack the depth and history of a full-length novel. But I took a chance on this one and I’m so glad I did. Danticat had a way of immediately getting into the heart and humanity of the characters, giving just enough history to set the stage and then hooking the reader in with the beauty or the heartbreak of the situations. At times relatable and at times educationally foreign, the stories will stick with me for a long time to come.
Another wonderful collection from this author!
Gritty, emotional, intimate stories of immigrant lives, loves, traumas & joys. A must read
FICTION: Haitian-Americans yearn, love and make mistakes in Edwidge Danticat’s moving new collection.
By JENNY SHANK Special to the Star Tribune AUGUST 29, 2019 — 4:25PM
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Edwidge Danticat has been laying waste to readers’ hearts with her gorgeous prose for 25 years. She published her first novel, “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” when she was 25, and Oprah selected it for her book club. Danticat managed the spotlight with grace and has only deepened her art, as evidenced by “Everything Inside,” her collection of eight soulful stories about Haitian immigrants in America and their descendants.
Love and its attendant vulnerability and loss is Danticat’s primary subject. These stories turn on secrets, betrayal and accidents, but never feel melodramatic; traumas shake even ordinary lives.
Danticat’s tenderhearted characters are moved by other people’s grief for a father they never knew (“In the Old Days”), or hoodwinked by a plea for money from an ex-husband claiming the woman he cheated with has been kidnapped (“Dosas”). Danticat’s characters give, they love, they agree to requests it would be wiser to refuse: They are relentlessly all-in. By drawing the reader deep into her characters’ psyches, Danticat makes us complicit in their bad moves.
What’s the right way to love? In several stories, Haitian-Americans’ views on this subject clash with native Haitian customs. In “The Port-au-Prince Marriage Special,” the Haitian-American narrator and her husband open a hotel in Haiti. When an employee falls ill with AIDS, they try to help her. The narrator enjoins the sick woman’s mother to be more loving, while imagining the woman’s thoughts: “Why does it all come back to one kind of love with them, the kind of love you keep talking about rather than the kind of love that shatters you to pieces?”
In “Sunrise, Sunset,” Carole is a Haitian immigrant with dementia who thinks her daughter should simply shake off her postpartum depression. “Doesn’t she know that she is an exception in this world, where it is normal to be unhappy, to be hungry, to work nonstop and earn next to nothing, and to suffer the whims of everything from tyrants to hurricanes and earthquakes?”
The final and most devastating story in the collection, “Without Inspection,” begins, “It took Arnold six and a half seconds to fall five hundred feet.” You might tell yourself not to get attached. But the struggle against attachment is futile. You’re immediately as much of a goner as Arnold is.
As he plunges, Danticat conjures Arnold’s almost-fatal journey across the ocean; Darline, the widow he loves; Paris, her son with a disability; and the simple pleasures of Arnold’s life. “There are loves that outlive lovers,” Arnold thinks. “Darline would now have two of those. He would also have two: Darline and Paris.”
We’re all terminal cases, Danticat’s lush stories suggest, but that doesn’t mean that any of us are unworthy of love.
Danticat’s work always has the ability to grip me with its urgency and keep me invested with the conflicts she addresses. The eight stories in this collection pulled at my heartstrings and produced a strong emotional impact that left me reflecting on the grace and tenderness in which Danticat handles the examination of loss and sorrow through her characters. Each of the stories takes place either in Miami or in the Caribbean, and Danticat lends her masterful eye at exploring adversity within family and relationships while also focusing on larger global issues of poverty and immigration. Once I started each story, the subtle tension and heartfelt drama became page-turning. I often like to read story collections with each piece serving as a single sitting, but these stories had he reading two or more at a time until I raced through the volume and then wanted more.
Beautiful, haunting, sad, romantic. Each of the eight stories in Danticat’s new book is as personal and moving as the next. Read it in one seating.