Word: danticat
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...M.F.A. from Brown three years later. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, a semi-autobiographical tale of a Haitian girl reunited with her mother in the U.S., was published in 1994. The lyrical and haunting short-story collection Krik? Krak! came out the following year. And earlier this year, Danticat won the literary lottery when Oprah Winfrey chose Breath, Eyes, Memory as the June selection for her hugely popular on-air book club. "The call came out of the blue," says Danticat, who had met the talk-show queen while working as an extra on the set of Winfrey...
Though Breath, Eyes, Memory caught Oprah's eye, Danticat's The Farming of Bones is a richer, more resonant work. There is magic and loss on nearly every page. At one point in the novel, a man who has been struck by a machete and left for dead in a pile of corpses tells his story. "'I felt like my woman on our first night together,' he said. 'She woke up in the middle of the night and started screaming...this was her first night outside her mother's bed and she'd plain forgotten where she was... Waking...
That scene captures some of Danticat's essence. Her pleasant serenity in person is really evidence of her inner confidence, her ability to stay calm and focused despite whatever is around her. The Farming of Bones recounts tales of horror, but it never turns purple, never spins wildly into the fantastic, always remains focused, with precise, disciplined language, and in doing so, it uncovers moments of raw humanness. This is a book that, confronted with corpses, has the cold-eyed courage to find a smile...
...first time around, Mitchard was a virtual unknown: a Madison, Wis., newspaper columnist and a widowed mother of five. Then she got what has come to be known, for a select group including Toni Morrison, Alice Hoffman and, most recently, Edwidge Danticat, as "the call." Says Mitchard, laughing: "It fell under the category of 'Who knew?' I was dumbfounded, honest to gosh." On her follow-up book, the hard part was to exorcise all notions of trying to duplicate the previous success. "The temptation is to just write something like, 'He had a hairy chest, she had big breasts...