About the Book One day Violet, a young Jamaican girl, surprises a mermaid near a remote beach in Jamaica. The mermaid accidentally drops her golden comb on the beach and asks Violet to retrieve it for her, but she is not to tell anyone about the mermaid. Violet is in a quandary and ends up telling her mother, who tells others. Violet retrieves the comb from the beach for the mermaid, who is grateful but upset that Violet told about her presence. But in the end, the mermaid gives Violet a valuable gift that lifts her and her family out of poverty. About the Author Bill Gerwick is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, studying marine algae as sources of new pharmaceuticals, such as new anticancer and antimalarial drugs. He has been scuba diving for more than 50 years but has never seen a mermaid. His research has taken him to many tropical locations around the world to make sample collections, including Jamaica. The Jamaican lady who told him this tale was a dear family friend.

“In these kaleidoscopic stories of Jamaica and its diaspora we hear many voices at once. All of them convince and sing. All of them shine.”—Zadie Smith An O: The Oprah Magazine “Top 15 Best of the Year” • A Well-Read Black Girl Pick Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret—Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life. In “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In “Mash Up Love,” a twin’s chance sighting of his estranged brother—the prodigal son of the family—stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In “Bad Behavior,” a couple leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In “Mermaid River,” a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In “The Ghost of Jia Yi,” a recently murdered student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in “Shirley from a Small Place,” a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother’s big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital. Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction’s most dynamic and essential authors. Praise for How to Love a Jamaican “A sublime short-story collection from newcomer Alexia Arthurs that explores, through various characters, a specific strand of the immigrant experience.”—Entertainment Weekly “With its singular mix of psychological precision and sun-kissed lyricism, this dazzling debut marks the emergence of a knockout new voice.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Gorgeous, tender, heartbreaking stories . . . Arthurs is a witty, perceptive, and generous writer, and this is a book that will last.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties “Vivid and exciting . . . every story rings beautifully true.”—Marie Claire

Mervyn Morris was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2014. He has had an abiding impact on the literature of the Caribbean as poet, essayist and teacher. Peelin Orange, with its mix of Englishes (Standard, Jamaican Creole – patois – and a combination of the two), and its variety of forms, from free verse to metred and rhymed measures, represents half a century of invention and re-invention. Morris knows how universals can inhere in the local, the incarnation in a Caribbean setting. With his light, intense musicality, he speaks to and for a community. His wit, his love of people and places, his anarchic 'Afro-Saxon' spirit, ensure that his poems are full of surprise in language, image and in the turns of sense they make.

A POPSUGAR Best Book of December 2020 An AMAZON Editors Pick December 2020 A SHE READS Best Historical Fiction Novel Winter 2021 A BUSTLE Most Anticipated Winter 2021 Read A LIBRO.FM Influencer Pick, December 2020 Inspired by true events on Korea's Jeju Island, Sumi Hahn's "entrancing [debut] novel, brimming with lyricism and magic" (Jennifer Rosner, The Yellow Bird Sings) explores what it means to truly love in the wake of devastation. In the aftermath of World War II, Goh Junja is a girl just coming into her own. She is the latest successful deep sea diver in a family of strong haenyeo. Confident she is a woman now, Junja urges her mother to allow her to make the Goh family's annual trip to Mt. Halla, where they trade abalone and other sea delicacies for pork. Junja, a sea village girl, has never been to the mountains, where it smells like mushrooms and earth. While there, she falls in love with a mountain boy Yang Suwol, who rescues her after a particularly harrowing journey. But when Junja returns one day later, it is just in time to see her mother take her last breath, beaten by the waves during a dive she was taking in Junja's place. Spiraling in grief, Junja sees her younger siblings sent to live with their estranged father. Everywhere she turns, Junja is haunted by the loss of her mother, from the meticulously tended herb garden that has now begun to sprout weeds, to the field where their bed sheets are beaten. She has only her grandmother and herself. But the world moves on without Junja. The political climate is perilous. Still reeling from Japan's forced withdrawal from the peninsula, Korea is forced to accommodate the rapid establishment of US troops. Junja's canny grandmother, who lived through the Japanese invasion that led to Korea's occupation understands the signs of danger all too well. When Suwol is arrested for working with and harboring communists, and the perils of post-WWII overtake her homelands, Junja must learn to navigate a tumultuous world unlike anything she's ever known.

Come along for 25 Mermaid’s adventures, collected together in one ebook - easy-to-read and easy-to-navigate! In folklore, a mermaid is an aquatic creature with the head and upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish. Mermaids appear in the folklore of many cultures worldwide, including the Near East, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Mermaids have been a popular subject of art and literature in recent centuries, such as in Hans Christian Andersen's literary fairy tale "The Little Mermaid". In this great book collected works of Hans Christian Andersen, James Barrie, Andrew Lang, L. Frank Baum, H. G. Wells, Bret Harte, Louise M. Alcott et al. Hans Christian Andersen. The Little Mermaid Jonathan Ceredig Davies. Fairies and Mermaids Andrew Lang. The Golden Mermaid. Andrew Lang. Hans, the Mermaid’s Son Mabel Quiller-Couch. Lutey and the Mermaid Mrs. Molesworth. The Unselfish Mermaid Anonymous. The Fisherman and The Merman Abbie Phillips Walker. Hilda's Mermaid Charles Weathers Bump. The Mermaid of Druid Lake Louisa M. Alcott. Mermaids Louise Imogen Guiney. Water-Folk Abbie Farwell Brown. The Mermaid L. Frank Baum. The Sea Fairies Clara F. Guernsey. The Merman and The Figure-Head William Elliot Griffis. The Entangled Mermaid H. G. Wells. The Sea Lady Daniel O'Сonnor. The Story of Peter Pan Retold from the fairy play by Sir James Barrie E. Nesbit. Wet Magic Kirk Munroe. A Fighting Mermaid Lily Dougal. The Mermaid Bret Harte. The Mermaid Of Lighthouse Point Grant M. Overton. Mermaid G. Basil Barham. The Mermaid of Zennor John Timbs. Stories of Mermaids Philip Henry Gosse. Mermaids

A little girl finds a stuffed dog in the park and decides to take it home.

Jamaican-born novelist and sociologist Erna Brodber describes Myal as “an exploration of the links between the way of life forged by the people of two points of the black diaspora—the Afro-Americans and the Afro-Jamaicans.” Operating on many literary levels—thematically, linguistically, stylistically—it is the story of women’s cultural and spiritual struggle in colonial Jamaica. The novel opens at the beginning of the 20th century with a community gathering to heal the mysterious illness of a young woman, Ella, who has returned to Jamaica after an unsuccessful marriage abroad. The Afro-Jamaican religion myal, which asserts that good has the power to conquer all, is invoked to heal Ella, who has been left "zombified” and devoid of any black soul. Ella, who is light skinned enough to pass for white, has suffered a breakdown after her white American husband produced a black-face minstrel show based on the stories of her village and childhood. This cultural appropriation is one of a series Ella encountered in her life, and parallels the ongoing theft of the labor and culture of colonized peoples for imperial gain and pleasure. The novel‘s rich, vivid language and vital characters earned it the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Canada and the Caribbean. The novel links nicely with Brodber’s coming-of-age story, Jane & Louisa Will Soon Come Home, also from Waveland Press, for its similar images, themes, and specific Jamaican cultural references to colonialism, religion, slavery, gender, and identity. Both novels are Brodber’s way of telling stories outside of published history to point out the whitewashing and distortion of black history through religion and colonialism.

"Throughout her life my mother [Doris] lived in two places at once: Kingston, Jamaica, where she raised a family of nine children, and Harvey River, in the parish of Hanover, where she was born and grew up." In the tradition of Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and Carlos Eire's Waiting for Snow in Havana comes Lorna Goodison's luminous memoir of her forebears—From Harvey River. When Doris' English grandfather, William Harvey, discovers a clearing at the end of a path cut by the feet of those running from slavery, he gives his name to what will become his family's home for generations. For Doris, Harvey River is the place she always called home, the place where she was one of the "fabulous Harvey girls" and where the rich local bounty of the land went hand in hand with the Victorian niceties and comforts of her parents' house. It is a place she will return to in dreams when her fortunes change, years later, and she and her husband, Marcus Goodison, relocate to "hard life" Kingston and encounter the harsh realities of urban living in close quarters as they raise their family of nine children. In lush prose, Lorna Goodison weaves memory and island lore to create a vivid, universally appealing tapestry.