"The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark," Jamaica Kincaid writes in the essay "On Seeing England for the First Time" (1991). And it is this space, which "starts out empty . . . but rapidly becomes...

"As I go on writing, I feel less and less interested in the approval of the First World, and I never had the approval of the world I came from, so now I don't know where I am. I've exiled myself yet again," pronounced Jamaica Kincaid in a 1990...

Jamaica Kincaid gained wide acclaim with her first two works, At the Bottom of the River and Annie John. In these and other books about life on the Caribbean island of Antigua, where she was born, Kincaid employs a highly poetic literary style...

Antigua-born writer Jamaica Kincaid, author of such praiseworthy books as 'A Small Place' and 'Annie John,' discusses her approach to writing in light of her most recent novel, 'The Autobiography of My Mother.' Kincaid prefers to work spontaneously, rather than according to a fixed...

Jamaica Kincaid's novels focus on the themes of loss and betrayal, particularly a mother's betrayal of her daughter. This sense of betrayal is underlined by treachery that reflects a constantly changing reality that displaces a paradise of some sort. That paradise is hazy, partly...

When Uzodinma Iweala's debut novel, "Beasts of No Nation," was published in 2005, book critics jostled for room at the literary altar to offer praise.They called the book, about a child soldier in an unnamed African country, "brilliant," "astonishing," "riveting," "extraordinary," "searing," "electrifying" and "powerful."...

THICK AS THIEVES: A BROTHER, A SISTER—A TRUE STORY OF TWO TURBULENT LIVESBy Steve Geng Henry Holt, 292 pages, $24 Several of New Yorker satirist and editor Veronica Geng’s friends—among them Philip Roth, Jamaica Kincaid and Roy Blount Jr.—were sitting around in an Italian restaurant...

In the following essay, Paravisini-Gebert offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of the stories in At the Bottom of the River.

In the following excerpt, Ferguson views colonialism as a central theme of the stories in At the Bottom of the River.

In the following essay, Simmons asserts that if read together and within the context of Kincaid's other work, the stories in At the Bottom of the River “trace an emotional journey, a journey of mourning.”