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'In this thrilling debut collection Alexia Arthurs is all too easy to love.' Zadie Smith
'Impressive' Observer
'A summer must-read' Stylist
One of Oprah Magazine's 15 Favourite Books of 2018.
'There is a way to be cruel that seems Jamaican to me.'
Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret - Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection of short stories, How to Love a Jamaican, 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 mother and father 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 international 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.
The winner of the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for 'Bad Behavior', Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction's most dynamic and essential young authors.
Enquiring minds want to know: Why do Jamaicans run so fast? Usain Bolt may be the most recent and the most spectacular Jamaican practitioner of the art of speed, but he and Shelly-Ann Fraser stand on the shoulders of giants of both genders, heirs to a pedigree that goes back at least a hundred years to the teenaged Norman Manley and before.
For years before the explosion of Lightning Bolt on the Beijing Olympics track, the consistent speediness of men and women from this small island had been the subject of serious and humorous speculation, pride and su-su. What is the gold that is mined so consistently by Jamaican sprinters that permits the little country to claim a place among the top five countries, measured in terms of medals per capita of population, in almost every Olympics since the Second World War and all on the basis of athletics, mostly the sprints (400 metres and under)?
Can science explain it? Does the touchy area of genetics even though, scientifically speaking, theres no such thing as race explain it? For instance, all the current world record holders for the sprints and most of the former for the past fifty years or so have been born in the Americas, descendants of slaves of West African lineage. Is running fast in the blood, so to speak? Or is it as simple as the varieties of yam (twenty-two at last count) to be found on the hills of Jamaica and in the stomachs of its people?
Behind the simple tales of the tape are theories and questions that have attracted fourteen specialists from a range of disciplines, from biochemistry to physiology, from genetics to psychiatry, each with an insight, a piece of the puzzle. Jamaican Gold presents research and argument, history and biography and much more for the specialist and the sports fan, for the academic and the coach, in one attractive, easy-to-read volume, packed with photographs and illustrations, including a special section of memorable photos of the heroes of yesteryear and today.
With Jamaican Gold to hand, the London Olympics will be just as thrilling, and youll be closer to answering the question: Why do those Jamaicans run so fast?
Collins Jamaican School Dictionary has been specially developed in association with teachers in Jamaica to ensure it meets the needs of students in Jamaican schools.
This dictionary which is fully up to date provides coverage of vocabulary from all curriculum subjects to ensure students have the language they need at their fingertips.
It provides guidance on grammar and punctuation, and includes a guide to spelling that covers key spelling rules, guidance on commonly confused and misspelled words and help with learning how to spell.
The social studies section provides essential information on the world around us, with key facts and maps.