“I reached the end of How to Escape from a Leper Colony with the exhilarating sense that
I had been on the best kind of journey—not,
finally, to the Virgin Islands nor Trinidad nor Houston nor London, but to the imagination of a wonderfully
talented young writer who has many more stories to tell.”
THE “BRUTAL, SEXUAL, MAGICAL, AND
SEDUCTIVELY DISTURBING” DEBUT COLLECTION FROM AN ARRESTING NEW CARIBBEAN VOICE (ROBERT ANTONI)
For a leper, many things are impossible, and many
other things are easily done. Babalao Chuck said he could fly to other side of
the island and peek at the nuns bathing. And when a man with no hands claims
that he can fly, you listen.
The inhabitants of an island walk into the sea. A man
passes a jail cell’s window, shouldering a wooden cross. And in the
international shop of coffins, a story repeats itself, pointing toward an
inevitable tragedy. If the facts of these stories are sometimes fantastical,
the situations they describe are complex, and all too real.
Lyrical, lush, and haunting, the prose shimmers in this
nuanced debut, set mostly in the US Virgin Islands. Part oral history, part
postcolonial narrative, How to Escape
from a Leper Colony is ultimately a loving portrait of a wholly unique
place—and an unforgettable, heartbreaking, hilarious, and mesmerizing
collection.
"I can't remember a debut that was quite so assured. . . . It is easy to imagine Yanique's characters in an adaptation for the stage: think 'Our Town,' set in the Caribbean, but with raw language and stories full of violence and sexuality. Plus it's funny, too. Are you listening, Oprah?"
—THE BOSTON GLOBE, "16 up-and-comers who might make it big in 2010"
“Tiphanie Yanique captures single moments
from a variety of perspectives that illuminate those instants in surprising
ways. . . . Yanique’s skill lies in
taking quick glimpses of people and situations and progressively deepening the
relief in which they are portrayed.”
—HARPER’S
“To wrap your mind around life on an island, you need to
understand insularity, restlessness, the way it feels to have a fluid sense of
identity. All this and more is what you get from Tiphanie Yanique’s haunting and vibrant debut fiction
collection.”
—O, THE OPRAH
MAGAZINE
“A skillfully crafted collection of short stories that
offer ample rewards—vivid
characterizations, evocative language—at their finish lines. . . . Unlike a
good deal of multicultural fiction, Yanique’s
stories look beyond mere ethnicity to locate the subtler strands of human
identity.”
—BOOKFORUM
This book is made possible through a partnership with the College of
Saint Benedict, and honors the legacy of S. Mariella Gable, a
distinguished teacher at the college.
