Wednesday, April 07, 2010

How To Escape From a Leper Colony - Tiphanie Yanique (Graywolf)

The inhabitants of an island walk into the sea. A man passes a jail cell’s window, shouldering a wooden cross. And in the international shop of coffins, a story repeats itself, pointing toward an inevitable tragedy. If the facts of these stories are sometimes fantastical, the situations they describe are complex, and all too real. Lyrical, lush, and haunting, the prose shimmers in this nuanced debut, set mostly in the US Virgin Islands. Part oral history, part postcolonial narrative, How to Escape from a Leper Colony is ultimately a loving portrait of a wholly unique place—and an unforgettable, heartbreaking, hilarious, and mesmerizing collection.

Tiphanie Yanique is from the Hospital Ground neighborhood of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing and Caribbean Literature with Drew University and an associate editor with Post-No-Ills. She lives between Brooklyn, New York, and St. Thomas.

About Graywolf Press
Founded in 1974, Graywolf Press is an independent, not-for-profit publisher dedicated to the creation and promotion of thoughtful and imaginative contemporary literature essential to a vital and diverse culture. A commitment to quality, and a willingness to embrace or invent new models, has kept Minneapolis-based Graywolf at the forefront of the small press movement. Today, Graywolf is considered one of the nation's leading nonprofit literary publishers, publishing fiction, memoir, essays, poetry, literary and cultural criticism, and literature in translation. Forthcoming this August is I Curse the River of Time by international bestseller Per Petterson, and out in November is Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems from President Obama’s Inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander.

Tiphanie Yanique: How To Escape From a Leper Colony
a novella and stories
200 pages, $15.00
ISBN 978-1-55597-550-0

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