3 Review(s)

Since its beginnings 33 years ago, Peepal Tree has published around 45 collections of Caribbean short stories, reinforcing the view that the short story is the Caribbean literary form par excellence. This anthology draws from those collections, plus a few guests, focusing on work written over the past twenty-five years, the majority dealing with the recent post-independence period up to the present. Though quality is the ultimate criteria, this anthology is unrivalled in its range across the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas, and representative of Caribbean ethnicities, gender and sexual orientations. Stories offer images of the city from ghettos to gated communities, suburbia, villages, the coastal margins. They display a range of contemporary concerns: social fragmentation, political corruption, sexual politics. They display a range of short story genres from satire, gritty realism, magical realism, fantasy, the gothic, the folkloric, horror, crime, erotica, flash fiction, the speculative... Whilst the stories in the anthology collectively offer an insightful picture of both the contemporary Caribbean and of the current status of the Caribbean short story as a form, the overall editorial aim has been to create a book that gives the reader a rich, varied and rewarding reading experience. The collection includes the work of, amongst others, Opal Palmer Adisa, Christine Barrow, Rhoda Bharath, Jacqueline Bishop, Hazel Campbell, Merle Collins, Cyril Dabydeen, Kwame Dawes, Curdella Forbes, Ifeona Fulani, Keith Jardim, Barbara Jenkins, Meiling Jin, Cherie Jones, Helen Klonaris, Sharon Leach, Jan Shinebourne, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and N.D. Williams.