Vintage Contemporaries / Everything Inside

 

Elsie s patient s eyes wandered down from the ceiling, where the blooming palm had sprinkled the skylight glass with a handful of brown seeds. Gaspard had been pretending not to hear, but was now looking directly at her. Restlessly shifting his weight from one side of the bed to the next, he paused now and then to catch his breath.

 

Gaspard had turned sixty-­five that day and before his lunch had requested a bottle of Champagne from his daughter ­ Champagne that he shouldn t be having, but for which he d pleaded so much that his daughter had given in, on the condition that he would only take a few sips. The daughter, Mona, who was a decade younger than Elsie s thirty-six years, had come from New York to visit her father in Miami Lakes. She d gone out to procure the Champagne and now she was back.

 

Elsie, I need you to hang up, Mona said as she walked into the room and laid out three crystal Champagne flutes on a folding table by the bed.

 

Call me soon, Elsie told Blaise.

 

After she hung up, Elsie moved closer to the sick man s spindly daughter. They were about the same height and size, but Elsie felt that she could be Mona s mother. This was perhaps due to her many years of taking care of others. She was a nurse s assistant, though no nurse was present on this particular job. She was there to keep Gaspard safe and comfortable, recording vital signs, feeding and grooming him, doing some light housework, and overall keeping him company between his twice-­weekly dialysis sessions, until he decided whether or not he would accept his daughter s offer of one of her kidneys. Mona had been approved as a donor, but Gaspard had still not made up his mind

wanderers find their heart s home, wherever it may be. Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

Impactful . . . Danticat reveals with stunning precision the myriad ways lovers, friends, parents, and even nations people [can] disappoint, as well as the hard knowledge that shapes their path forward. Danticat s women, in particular, find the narrow spaces where they learn to live with difficult decisions. Haiti remains a vital presence when a woman says, 'I can t live without my country,' it s as if she s talking about a vital organ. Danticat writes with spare, clean prose; she lets her words breathe. With an unfaltering voice and evocative beauty, Danticat shows the uncelebrated resilience it takes to move toward something that, if not quite happiness, still burns brighter than sorrow. Renée Graham, The Boston Globe

Danticat's voice has woven its way into our consciousness, with unforgettable tales of families and lovers from Haiti to Miami, Brooklyn, and beyond often struggling with grief, loss, and missed connections. Her new book deals with marriage and mortality, secrets and separations, as well as the physical and psychological aftershocks of Haiti s devastating 2010 earthquake. Anderson Tepper, Vanity Fair

Heart-rending. . . Danticat creates an emotionally rich universe. Though the stories in Everything Inside are linked by themes of love, death, and family,  each is distinctive, gripping, and memorable in its own right, creating a collection that highlights the acclaimed storyteller at her best. Lydia Wang, Bust Magazine
 
"Surprising, astute, memorable and vibrant stories from [an] incomparable author." Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine

Soulful, lush . . . Danticat s tenderhearted characters give, they love, they agree to requests it would be wiser to refuse: they are relentlessly all-in. Danticat draws the reader deep into their psyches [and] makes us complicit in their bad moves. These stories, about Haitian immigrants in America and their descendants, turn on secrets, betrayal and accidents, but never feel melodramatic; traumas shake even ordinary lives. Edwidge Danticat has been laying waste to readers hearts with her gorgeous prose for 25 years with Everything Inside, she has only deepened her art. Jenny Shank, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Vibrant and hauntingly human. Meredith Boe, Chicago Review of Books

Simply breathtaking heart-rending, exquisite. Steve Whitton, The Anniston Star

A book about love in its many forms, and its costs . . . The stories reveal the possibilities and dangers of relationships, where one life brushes up against another. Characters bridge boundaries of self, culture and geography, risking much to gain much . . . Good historians like Danticat illustrate the importance of learning from our past, and from one another.
Abby Manzella, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Bittersweet, satisfying. Layering unsentimental, clear writing with resonant imagery, Danticat delivers elegant gut-punches of irony. How can and should the artist, the writer, and the privileged among us respond creatively to another s suffering? How do we appropriately witness someone else s pain? This is existentialist fiction: our full essence everything inside is not manifest until the moment of death. Everything Inside is [a] hallmark of Danticat s mastery of prose of the way she coaxes beauty from pain. Joanie Conwell, Los Angeles Review of Books

Eight powerful tales of diaspora, love, loss, and in some cases, redemption. Danticat s writing is language stripped bare, which lets her stories and characters breathe. There is a rising intensity in these stories, from the first sentence of the first page . . . A masterful collection, beautifully wrought and elegantly told. Yvonne C. Garrett, The Brooklyn Rail

Poignant, emotionally driven stories by the masterful Danticat, set everywhere from Miami to an unnamed Caribbean island. It's Marie Claire's #ReadWithMC September book club pick, so trust us on this it's a good one. Alexis Jones, Marie Claire

Astounding . . . written with the kind of emotional precision that leaves you gasping. We meet a whole cast of characters who feel absolutely real: so striking in their ordinariness, so complex in their humanity. Danticat is a fiction master. Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed

Top-notch storytelling. Emily Temple, Lit Hub

Powerful and poignant, heartbreaking and hopeful . . . Everything Inside mines the emotional and psychological landscapes of Haitian immigrants through rich narratives that explore the nature of family, identity and home. These are narratives about people struggling to connect across continents, across generations. Julie Hale, BookPage

Rich, vibrant. Haiti is the emotional core of this collection, though the characters roam the world. Lovers reconcile after a catastrophe, a daughter meets her dying father for the first and last time and a family reunites at a baby s christening.
Joumana Khatib, The New York Times 11 New Books to Watch For in August
 
National Book Award finalist Danticat uses eight short stories to dissect the family unit, diving into marriage, parenthood and young love. The collection tests the strength of familial bonds as characters deal with tragedies of all sizes. Danticat takes readers to her birthplace of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as well as Miami and an unnamed part of the Caribbean in these narratives that probe the intersections of community, compassion and loss.
Annabel Gutterman, Time 11 New Books You Should Read in August
 
Vigorous, compelling . . . Everything Inside provides a storyteller s insight to how migration to and from the Caribbean affected people s lives, personalities, and relationships.
Jianan Qian, The Millions
 
Internationally acclaimed Danticat returns with a vivid collection of powerful short stories that weave together tales of tenacity, family and unexpected love.
Bridgette Bartlett Royall, Essence

Vast, moving, and intimate . . . Everything Inside explores all at once the full scope of human experience [and] tackles head on the complexity and impossibility of feeling. Kevin Chau, Lit Hub

Moving, striking [written] with powerful grace. A remarkable tenderness is the collection s most persistent theme. Danticat s work has always been quietly revolutionary . . . Danticat says these new characters may be thought of as the grandchildren of [those] in Krik? Krak!, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Dew Breaker. In Everything Inside, the characters include people born in America: rather than facing Haiti s gunmen and ghosts, this generation is navigating more quotidian concerns such as romantic breakups and sending kids to college. Political exile still appears . . . But generally, these are tales of a different exile of emotional severance and reconnection. In the end, we are left with these characters brutal, banal, and beautiful moments, like a wide night luminous, every so often, with firefly stars. Gabrielle Bellot, Publishers Weekly

Outstanding; deeply memorable . . . funny, charming, touching . . . Set among the Haitian dyaspora, the tales describe the complicated lives of people who live in one place but are drawn elsewhere. Families fracture and reform . . . In propulsive prose, and with great compassion, Danticat writes both of her characters losses and of their determination to continue. Publishers Weekly, [starred, boxed review]

Extraordinary: spare, evocative, moving. Danticat tackles the complexities of diaspora with lyrical grace. This collection draws on her exceptional strengths as a storyteller . . . She is a master of economy; she has always possessed the remarkable ability to build singular fictional worlds in a matter of sentences. These are stories of lives upended by tragedies big and small; Danticat attends to the ways families are made and unmade . . . She asks her readers to witness the integrity of her subjects as they excavate beauty and hope from uncertainty and loss. Kirkus (starred review)

Haunting . . . Danticat once again urges readers out of comfort zones to bear witness to urgent topics and alchemizes sorrows and tragedies into opportunities for enlightenment. Terry Hong, Booklist (starred review)