How to Love a Jamaican

"In these kaleidoscopic stories of Jamaica and its diaspora we hear many voices at once: some cultivated, some simple, some wickedly funny, some deeply melancholic. All of them shine." Zadie Smith

There is a way to be cruel that seems Jamaican to me.'

Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret - Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection of short stories, How to Love a Jamaican, about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and Midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life.

In 'Light Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands', an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In 'Mash Up Love', a twin's chance sighting of his estranged brother - the prodigal son of the family - stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In 'Bad Behavior', a mother and father leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In 'Mermaid River', a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In 'The Ghost of Jia Yi', a recently murdered international student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in 'Shirley from a Small Place', a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother's big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital.

The winner of the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for 'Bad Behavior', Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction's most dynamic and essential young authors.

PRAISE FOR HOW TO LOVE A JAMAICAN

"This dazzling debut marks the emergence of a knockout new voice." O: The Oprah Magazine

"In vibrant, evocative prose, Arthurs brings these characters, and their varied experiences of a shared home, to life." BuzzFeed

"Arthurs's collection of short stories tackles the immigrant experience, exploring it through the prism of family. One particular story that's sure to attract buzz: 'Shirley from a Small Place,' in which a world-famous pop star-based on Rihanna-retreats to her mother's new house in her birthplace of Jamaica." Entertainment Weekly

"Arthurs's debut is vivid and exciting, and every story rings beautifully true." Marie Claire

"The stories hum with tension and nuance, creating characters desperate to be understood but wary of being defined simply by their race or origins." Associated Press