"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...

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...

Wednesday 30thMy goodness, my Guinness! Some lessons learned this week: We've given up on taking the subway, at least when it's raining ( Moby-Dick or no Moby-Dick, the delays get our rage on); keeping a scale in the apartment does not inspire; other people actually...

Julia Roberts performs each night in Three Days of Rain at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater on 45th Street. The audiences chanting her name can be heard through the walls all the way into the theater next door. That neighboring theater, the Booth, is where...

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.”