Word: danticat
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BOOKS: Edwidge Danticat...
...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...
When The Dew Breaker (Knopf; 244 pages), Edwidge Danticat's book of linked stories, begins, a young artist born in Brooklyn, N.Y.--Haitian, though she's never been to Haiti--learns from her father how he acquired the scar on his cheek he brought back from prison. He wasn't one of those receiving punishments, he tells his already unsettled daughter; he was one inflicting them. His sense of guilt is one reason he gave her the name "Ka," after the good angel of ancient Egyptian mythology. It's also why he gets her to read The Book...
...island that has suffered decades of bloodshed and dictatorship--not to mention the possession of souls--seems to offer a formidable prospect for a novelist: What fiction can possibly stand up to such charged reality? Danticat, though, only 35 and already the author of three acclaimed works of fiction on her ill-starred home and one work of nonfiction, is undaunted. In The Dew Breaker she brings together myriad perspectives on the central torturer into a kind of mosaic. "It's a puzzle," as a teenage killer in one story says, "but a weird-ass kind of puzzle." A stained...
Whitehead has experienced a meteoric rise, even by Harvard standards. Called the “emerging Ralph Ellison of his generation” by writer Edwidge Danticat, who preceded Whitehead at the reading, his mixture of humor, rich allegory, and complex stories has already brought him fame as one of the great young American novelists...