Fiction. African American Studies. BAKEFACE AND OTHER GUAVA STORIES is the fi rst title in Mango Publishing's new Classic Series, which will bring back into print tried and tested quality fi ction with an international reputation. This established collection is made up of four Jamaican stories: `Bake-Face', `Duppy Get Her', `Me Man Angel' and `Widow's Walk'. Adisa won the 1987 Pushcart Prize award for the short story, `Duppy Get Her'. An important thematic thread running through the stories is woman's relationship with self, woman's relationships with one another and with men, community, motherhood, hope, emptiness and power. Marginalised by both patriarchal and imperial structures, these women have, in effect, been victimised into a kind of voicelessness which Adisa subverts through her writing. In the stories, Adisa develops a new language to give voice to her women characters. Hers is a voice speaking from within the community, though the narrative is frequently focalised through the protagonist's consciousness. "Solid, visceral, important stories written with integrity and love"--Alice Walker. Opal Palmer Adisa is a Jamaica-born novelist, poet, essayist, children's book author, visual artist, storyteller and teacher. Though she has lived in the United States since age 16, Adisa's work is rooted in Caribbean landscapes.

Dessert for Two takes well-loved desserts and scales them down to make only two servings! Who doesn't love towering three-layer cakes with mounds of fluffy buttercream? Who can resist four dozen cookies fresh from the oven? Wouldn't you love to stick your spoon into a big bowl of banana pudding? But what about the leftovers? Dessert recipes typically serve eight to ten people. Finding the willpower to resist extra slices of cake can be difficult; the battle between leftover cookies and a healthy breakfast is over before it starts. Until now. Dessert for Two takes well-loved desserts and scales them down to make only two servings. Cakes are baked in small pans and ramekins. Pies are baked in small pie pans or muffin cups. Cookie recipes are scaled down to make 1 dozen or fewer. Your favorite bars—brownies, blondies, and marshmallow–rice cereal treats—are baked in a loaf pan, which easily serves two when cut across the middle. Newly married couples and empty-nesters will be particularly enthralled with this miniature dessert guide. To everyone who lives alone: now you can have your own personal-sized cake and eat it, too.

V. 1. International dimensions of Black women's writing -- .

For review see: Joseph M. Murphy, in HAHR : The Hispanic American Historical Review, 78, 3 (August 1998); p. 495-496.

For the first time the Dutch-speaking regions of the Caribbean and Suriname are brought into fruitful dialogue with another major American literature, that of the anglophone Caribbean. The results are as stimulating as they are unexpected. The editors have coordinated the work of a distinguished international team of specialists. Read separately or as a set of three volumes, the History of Literature in the Caribbean is designed to serve as the primary reference book in this area. The reader can follow the comparative evolution of a literary genre or plot the development of a set of historical problems under the appropriate heading for the English- or Dutch-speaking region. An extensive index to names and dates of authors and significant historical figures completes the volume. The subeditors bring to their respective specialty areas a wealth of Caribbeanist experience. Vera M. Kutzinski is Professor of English, American, and Afro-American Literature at Yale University. Her book Sugar’s Secrets: Race and The Erotics of Cuban Nationalism, 1993, treated a crucial subject in the romance of the Caribbean nation. Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger has been very active in Latin American and Caribbean literary criticism for two decades, first at the Free University in Berlin and later at the University of Maryland. The editor of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, A. James Arnold, is Professor of French at the University of Virginia, where he founded the New World Studies graduate program. Over the past twenty years he has been a pioneer in the historical study of the Négritude movement and its successors in the francophone Caribbean.

It is increasingly difficult to use the word "victim" these days without facing either ridicule for "crying victim" or criticism for supposed harshness toward those traumatized. Some deny the possibility of "recovering" repressed memories of abuse, or consider date rape an invention of whining college students. At the opposite extreme, others contend that women who experience abuse are "survivors" likely destined to be psychically wounded for life. While the debates rage between victims' rights advocates and "backlash" authors, the contributors to New Versions of Victims collectively argue that we must move beyond these polarizations to examine the "victim" as a socially constructed term and to explore, in nuanced terms, why we see victims the way we do. Must one have been subject to extreme or prolonged suffering to merit designation as a victim? How are we to explain rape victims who seemingly "get over" their experience with no lingering emotional scars? Resisting the reductive oversimplifications of the polemicists, the contributors to New Versions of Victims critique exaggerated claims by victim advocates about the harm of victimization while simultaneously taking on the reactionary boilerplate of writers such as Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia and offering further strategies for countering the backlash. Written in clear, accessible language, New Versions of Victims offers a critical analysis of popular debates about victimization that will be applicable to both practice and theory.

This reference volume serves as a companion to Third World women's literatures in English and in English translation by presenting entries on works, writers, and themes. Entries are chosen to present a balance of well-known writers and emerging ones, contemporary as well as historical writers, and representative selections of genres, literary styles, and themes. What plays have been written by women in the developing world? What books have been written by Sri Lankan or Brazilian women? Which works address themes of feminism or exile or politics in the Third World? These are the types of questions that can now be answered through Fister's companion to Third World women's literatures in English and English translation. Organized alphabetically, this reference volume presents entries on works, writers, and themes. Entries are chosen to present a balance of well-known writers and emerging ones, contemporary as well as historical writers, and representative selections of genres, literary styles, and themes. By providing information about and leads to works by and about Third World women, an important and largely marginalized literature, Fister has created a unique reference tool that will help teachers, scholars, and librarians, both public and academic, expand their definitions of the literary, making the voices of Third World women available in the same format in which many companions to Western literature do. An important book for all public and college-level libraries.

" ... Documents the history and development of [Post-colonial literatures in English, together with English and American literature] and includes original research relating to the literatures of some 50 countries and territories. In more than 1,600 entries written by more than 600 internationally recognized scholars, it explores the effect of the colonial and post-colonial experience on literatures in English worldwide.

The Daughter's Return offers a close analysis of an emerging genre in African-American and Caribbean fiction produced by women writers who make imaginative returns to their ancestral pasts. Considering some of the defining texts of contemporary fiction--Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven--Rody discusses their common inclusion of a daughter who returns to the site of her people's founding trauma of slavery through memory or magic. Rody treats these texts as allegorical expressions of the desire of writers newly emerging into cultural authority to reclaim their difficult inheritance, and finds a counter plot of heroines' encounters with women of other racial and ethnic groups running through these works.