A bleak portrayal of life on the Dungle—the rubbish heap where the very poorest squat—this beautifully poetic, existentialist novel turns an unwavering eye to life in the Jamaican ghetto. By interweaving the stories of Dinah, a prostitute who can never quite escape the circumstances of her life, and Brother Solomon, a respected Rastafarian leader who allows his followers to think that a ship is on its way to take them home to Ethiopia, this brutally poetic story creates intense and tragic characters who struggle to come to grips with the absurdity of life. As these downtrodden protagonists shed their illusions and expectations, they realize that there is no escape from meaninglessness, and eventually gain a special kind of dignity and stoic awareness about life and the universe.

Jonathan Slovanco finds comfort and safety in his large family and in the Catholic Church. But as he matures, he realizes that a fundamental difference between him and other boys may alienate him from both his family and the Church. Coming to self-acceptance is difficult enough. Coupling that with the courage needed to reveal his genuine self to his family feels like a Sisyphean effort.

One of the most influential works of this century, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide; the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.

Prisoners released from our bloated American correctional institutions return to a mostly unwelcoming society where they face onerous post-release challenges. No wonder recidivism is near fifty percent, adding tens of billions of dollars annually to the cost of American prisons. Sisyphus No More is a multifaceted argument for increasing prisoner education and training programs to promote the reintegration into society of returning prisoners and increase the likelihood of their securing living-wage jobs. By greatly reducing recidivism, the programs will pay for themselves several times over. Such programs also humanize the treatment of prisoners and help them escape the fate of Sisyphus, the mythological king condemned to a bitterly repetitive fate. The book has two parts. The first provides background on the American prison system and enumerates the tolls incarceration takes on prisoners, their families, and their communities and the costs released prisoners continue to pay that severely hinder their reintegration. In the second part, the authors set forth compelling psychological, sociological, ethical, and financial grounds for increasing education and training to support the reintegration of released prisoners. The final two chapters report on innovative prison education programs and identify steps toward making education and training a priority in our prisons.

Through the tangled love life of one Alexander Blackman, Orlando Patterson offers up a devastating critique of middle-class pretension, turning instead to the vibrant realities of the Jamaican working class. Full of sardonic humour and social commentary, the novel looks into the dark heart of social hierarchy, colonial education and the impact both have on the individual and the many.

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.

African Americans and Jamaicans share a common past of forced dispersion from their original homelands and enslavement in the Americas. The legacies of white supremacy, racism and Euro-centrism are still influential in both societies today. The conditions of alienation and violence which are represented in African American and Jamaican cultural texts are tied to the sociological development of both societies. The processes of having to prove their humanity, as cultural communities and as individuals, have caused many African diasporic people to become alienated from - and violated by - the societies they live in.