Create Dangerously
The Immigrant Artist at Work
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4.8 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book
A Miami Herald Best Book of the Year
In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile.
Inspired by Albert Camus and adapted from her own lectures for Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Lecture Series, here Danticat tells stories of artists who create despite (or because of) the horrors that drove them from their homelands. Combining memoir and essay, these moving and eloquent pieces examine what it means to be an artist from a country in crisis.
BONUS MATERIAL: This edition includes an excerpt from Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In order to shield our shattered collective psyche from a long history of setbacks and disillusionment... we cultivate communal and historical amnesia..., writes novelist Danticat in this lean collection of jaw-breaking horrors side by side with luminous insights. This volume, which grows out of the Toni Morrison lecture series at Princeton, is uneven and inorganic in patches. But in Danticat s many remarkable stories and pens es from the gut, one locates the inimitable power of truth. Authorship becomes an act of subversion when one s words might be read and acted on by someone risking his or her life if only to read them. Danticat reminds us that, in a cruel twist of fate, her native Haiti, earthquake-and-poverty-torn, gained independence, in a bloody slave uprising, not long after the U.S. did: our ties, usually unexamined, run painfully deep. Whether eulogizing her family, writing on leading journalist Jean Dominique s assassination and exiled author Marie Vieux-Chauvet, or discussing Madison Avenue Primitive Jean-Michel Basquiat, Danticat documents what it means for an immigrant writer to create dangerously for immigrant readers who read dangerously, awakened and no longer participants in a culture of historical amnesia.
