The BookBrowse Review

Published July 30, 2025

ISSN: 1930-0018

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In This Edition of
The BookBrowse Review

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Editor's Introduction
Reviews
Hardcovers Paperbacks
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Literary Fiction


Historical Fiction


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Essays


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Biography/Memoir


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Young Adults

Literary Fiction


Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History


Graphic Novels


Biography/Memoir


History, Current Affairs and Religion


Extras
Book Jacket

Putting Myself Together
Writing 1973–
by Jamaica Kincaid
5 Aug 2025
336 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Genre: Essays
Critics:

My ignorance was on my side. I wasn't afraid. I didn't know what to be afraid of. I did one thing, I did another. I did what I now call crashing about. One day I started to write.

This collection of Jamaica Kincaid's nonfiction writing, including early pieces from publications such as The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and Ms., proves what her admirers have always known: from the start, she has been a consummate stylist, and she has always been herself.

From "Jamaica Kincaid's New York," which narrates her move to the city from Antigua at the age of sixteen and a half, to the classic "Biography of a Dress," her cultural criticism, and her original thinking about the meaning of the garden, Kincaid writes about the world as she finds it, imparting her own quizzical, rapier-sharp response to whatever crosses her path.

Putting Myself Together is a brilliant, trenchant, hilarious self-portrait of the artist and a testament to how this inimitable, self-created mind and spirit, endowed with wit, humor, and fearlessness, has become one of our greatest, most original writers.

"Kincaid's cutting prose shines, and the collection makes for a marvelous account of the author's life and career. This is a triumph." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Kincaid gathers more than 50 pieces of nonfiction—essays, introductions, memoir, and an interview with Athol Fugard—from 1973 to 2020, that reveal recurring themes: writing and gardening, friendship and family, and, most prominently, racism and colonialism...A spirited miscellany." —Kirkus Reviews

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John's, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, Mr. Potter, and See Now Then. She teaches at Harvard University and lives in Vermont.

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