Everything Is Now: New and Collected Stories [Hardcover]

Michelle Cliff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2009

Everything Is Now brings together all the short fiction of Michelle Cliff, featuring fourteen new pieces as well as the stories from her two previous short fiction collections (Bodies of Water and The Store of a Million Items).

Cliff, born in Jamaica and raised both there and in New York, skillfully weaves her own experiences into her fiction, exploring race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

With stunning lyricism, intelligence, and passion, Cliff confronts the dualities of our complex world: black and white, America and the third world, past and present, femininity and masculinity, colonialism and revolution.

Touching on such vital themes as memory, the passage of time, familial relationships, the presence of death, and the cross-influence of cultures, Michelle Cliff’s stories are broad in scope, rich in substance, and urgent in their message.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cliff's body of short fiction is amassed in this elegant collection in which ancestral misdeeds-slavery, witch hunts-return to haunt the present. In "My Grandmother's Eyes," a Jamaican immigrant's grandson pieces together the story of his grandmother, who came to America illegally by banana boat in 1923. Plucky and resourceful, she made her way as a dancer in Harlem, had fabulous adventures and many marriages, and bequeathed to her descendants a flair for the unconventional. The title story, echoing a quote by Toni Morrison, records a poignant meeting of a psychically gifted narrator, who is anticipating a rendezvous with her lover, and a bereft woman who seems to have time-traveled from the 1940s, still holding the telegram informing her that her soldier-lover was killed in action. "While Underneath" is the chilling account by an academic teaching at a Connecticut college who discovers that the school's subterranean network of tunnels (allegedly part of Underground Railroad) was the site of a hushed-up gang rape. Cliff is undeniably in control of her material, and even if some pieces feel too stylistically mannered, she uses fiction to elucidating effect.
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Book Description

Everything Is Now brings together all the short fiction of Michelle Cliff, featuring fourteen new pieces as well as the stories from her two previous short fiction collections (Bodies of Water and The Store of a Million Items).

Cliff, born in Jamaica and raised both there and in New York, skillfully weaves her own experiences into her fiction, exploring race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

With stunning lyricism, intelligence, and passion, Cliff confronts the dualities of our complex world: black and white, America and the third world, past and present, femininity and masculinity, colonialism and revolution.

Touching on such vital themes as memory, the passage of time, familial relationships, the presence of death, and the cross-influence of cultures, Michelle Cliff’s stories are broad in scope, rich in substance, and urgent in their message.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press (April 27, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816655936
• ISBN-13: 978-0816655939
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,194,008 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michelle Cliff was born in Jamaica and is the author of two previous novels, No Telephone to Heaven and Abeng; a collection of short stories, and two poetry collections. Her fiction, poetry, and esays have appeared in numerous publications, including Parnassus and the VLS.