Find a New Kind of Beach Read with Caribbean Short Fiction

Want something quick to read in between dips in the lake? Try a story from a region with some of the finest writers (and beaches) in the world! Just lay back and allow your local public library to serve you a nice, cool sip of Caribbean short fiction. Don't worry. It’s on us!

In her beautiful collection of poetry and prose At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid tackles weighty topics like mothers, daughters, men and women all in just 80 pages. While her dream-like, rapid-fire imagery recalls the fluid transformations of 60s psychedelic animation, readers will sense an unmistakable hint of anger darting just below the surface. If you read just one piece, check out “Girl." Written entirely as a series of instructions from an Antiguan mother to her young daughter, it’s one of the most widely anthologized stories in the English language.

Loosely fictionalizing Junot Diaz’s life growing up in the Dominican Republic and immigrating to New Jersey, the stories in Drown humorously peel back the layers of Dominican machismo to reveal the desperation and insecurity hidden (not too deeply) underneath. Pairing well with Kincaid’s examination of Caribbean femininity, check out Diaz’s own instructional story “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)."

Hailing from the other side of the great Island of Hispaniola, the wonderfully humanist work of Edwidge Danticat reminds us “Amerikens” that Haiti has far more going for it than some bad headlines may lead you to believe. Grappling with the tragedies haunting her homeland, while never letting them swallow her character's individuality, the realist stories of Everything Inside recognize that life is lived between a thousand contradictions.

Editor Nalo Hopkinson writes in her introduction that “Northern science fiction and fantasy comes out of a rational, skeptical approach to the world." Well a lot of this northern rationality (especially when it comes to our political and economic agendas) ends up feeling pretty arbitrary, absurd, and destabilizing by the time its results wash up in the Caribbean. Taking its name from the massive, primordial Ceiba trees that dot the islands, the stories in Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root combine the region's unique mix of folk traditions with the emotional experience of being poor nations subject to the winds and whims of those to the north.

Short stories aren’t for everyone so here’s an episodic novel that's easily dipped in and out of. Featuring extremely rich prose translated from Martinican creole, Texaco is an epic, humorous oral history of one Martinique shanty town from its founding in the 1820s to its threatened demolition in the 1980s. While the modern immigration experience is core to the work of the authors listed above, Texaco not only provides some sweep of history, it also highlights how hard Caribbeans will fight to not have to leave!