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At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid
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At the Bottom of the River

$13.46

Retail price: $14.95

Discount: 9%

This title is not eligible for purchase with membership credits. Why?

Narrator Robin Miles

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Length 2 hours 15 minutes
Language English
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This collection is Jamaica Kincaid’s earliest published writings: her inspired, lyrical short stories.

These stories plunge the listener gently into another way of perceiving both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her narrative is, by turns, naïvely whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered, partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean—family, manners, and landscape—as distilled and transformed by Kincaid’s special style and vision.

Kincaid leads us to consider, as if for the first time, the powerful ties between mother and child, the beauty and destructiveness of nature, the gulf between the masculine and the feminine, the significance of such familiar things as a house, a cup, a pen. Transfiguring our human form and our surroundings—shedding skin, darkening an afternoon, painting a perfect place—these stories tell us something we didn’t know, in a way we hadn’t expected.

Jamaica Kincaid is the author of short stories, novels, and nonfiction, including See Now Then, which was a New York Times bestseller. She is the 2022 recipient of the Hadada Award, the Paris Review’s award for lifetime achievement. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Étranger, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Dan David Prize for Literature. She is a professor of African and African American studies at Harvard and a visiting writer at UCLA in the spring of 2022. She was born in St. John’s and is a former reporter for the New Yorker magazine.

Robin Miles began her audiobook narration in 1994.  She's read over 130 titles covering many different genres and has won multiple Earphones awards.  Her many audiobook credits include Augusten Burroughs's Sellevision, Edwidge Danticat's Brother I'm Dying, and Lalita Tademy's Cane River.  Her film and television credits include The Last Days of Disco, Primary Colors, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order, New York Undercover, National Geographic’s Tales from the Wild, All My Children, and One Life to Live.  She regularly gives seminars to members of SAG and AFTRA actors' unions, and in 2005 she started Narration Arts Workshop in New York City, offering audiobook recording classes and coaching.  She holds a B.A. in Theater Studies from Yale University, an MFA in acting from the Yale School of Drama, and a certificate from the British American Drama Academy in England.

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In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support African American Literature Book Club!

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Reviews

“These stories have all of poetry’s virtues—care for language, joy in the sheer sounds of words, and evocative power…beautiful to listen to.”

“Eccentric, visionary pieces…[with] all the force of illumination and even prophetic power.”

“Hers is a voice you have never heard before…Exhilarating to read and impossible to forget.”

“She jumps with grace and ease from the mundane to the enormous, and, fascinated, we believe her.”

“The voice—incantatory, lyric, rhapsodic—is closer to the condition of poetry and music than to fiction in any of its ordinary registers.”

“Her first collection is flecked with individuality and talent—especially in the more ironic sequences…Kincaid shows vivid promise in this slim debut.”

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