Word: danticat
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lahiri's rise is part of a changing of the guard in American fiction, from a generation in which white American-born men still play a primary role (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon) to one in which the principal voices weren't born here, like Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat (born in Haiti), Gary Shteyngart (Russia) and Junot Díaz (the Dominican Republic). They're transnationals, writers for whom displacement and dual cultural citizenship aren't a temporary political accident but the status...
...Lahiri already has a powerful novel (The Namesake) and a Pulitzer-winning story collection. Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close) has got a lot of attention both popular and critical, and he's only 29. A somewhat partisan sampling would also include Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist), 36; Edwidge Danticat (Breath, Eyes, Memory), 37; Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity), 36; Arthur Phillips (Prague), 37; Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep), 30; Myla Goldberg (Bee Season), 34; Nicole Krauss (The History of Love), 31; and Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan), 33. If we open our borders to the Brits, we also get Zadie Smith...
...BREAKER XBy Edwidge Danticat One needs a new term to describe Danticat's book: A novel-in-stories? A story-circle? In the first chapter the daughter of Haitian expats living in Brooklyn learns that her father is not, as she thought, a former prison inmate. He was a prison guard and, worse, a torturer and an executioner for the bloody Duvalier regime. The chapters that follow explore the rings of aftermath that spread out from his crimes like terrible ripples; in the final, riveting chapter, we confront the torturer himself at work...
...BOOKS: Danticat's haunted Haiti...
...storytelling wakes of home. The dew breaker himself is drawn to the ancient Egyptians because "they know how to grieve." The only redeeming thing about committing terrible acts, he seems to know, is that it impels one to try to lead the rest of one's life more cleanly. Danticat's gift is to combine both sympathy and clarity in a moral tangle that becomes as tight as a Haitian community. She doesn't try to bring everything together into a grand resolution, because she's too wise about Haiti and history to expect the future of her country...