Pires, BC (14 June 2015). "The beauty of the writing beast". Trinidad & Tobago Guardian . Retrieved 3 February 2021. Don't troll. If your post is primarily to provoke, please think twice before posting, and then don't post it. If your post is secondarily to provoke, think twice, and then don't post it. We’re trying to figure it out as well. For me, the internet has given me access that might not have been possible 10 years ago. I also think [Jamaican writer] Marlon James helped us [writers from the Caribbean] when he won the Booker prize and a lot of publishers were looking for a follow-up. Not long after that, Kei Miller sold Augustown for six figures. The Bocas literary festival also helped a lot; I think they started in 2012. Before that the literary scene in Trinidad was a wasteland. My pa play cards with a man who work up there sometimes – Mr Baig. My pa was laughing when he was tellin it but it make my blood boil. That Mr Changoor probably just say is a dumb dog. Nothin worth going out in the rain for. Them people aint care bout nothin. Dogs smart, you know, but is only dumb animals to them. Just like we. So, I aint tyin up the dog, you hear?’

A dissection of class, disloyalty, extreme poverty, colonialism, generational trauma, abuse, explosive barbarity, (disclaimer: if you can’t handle reading about violence against animals, don’t go here). It’s rare that a title sums up a book as succinctly as Hungry Ghosts, Trinidadian writer Kevin Jared Hosein’s magnificent first novel for adults. When you gonna marry Lata?’ Tarak suddenly asked. Krishna swooped his arm up, nearly losing his balance. ‘ What?’ All the fish dispersed. Biting the Hand , by Julia Lee (Holt). In this affecting memoir, a literature professor whose parents emigrated from South Korea writes about her “inheritance” of what Koreans call han—a culturally specific mixture of rage and shame—as well as the insidious tendency of “racial shame” to separate “people of color from one another.” Lee mixes personal anecdotes, including experiences of racism, with analyses of racially charged historical events, such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots, during which “thousands of Korean-owned businesses were looted and torched.” She argues that white supremacy has been bolstered by a “culture of scarcity,” in which “there’s only a certain amount of bandwidth available in the American consciousness to deal with racial oppression.” Changing this will involve rejecting an entire “racial imaginary” that makes room only for the broad categories of white and nonwhite people. Claudia, though, has a fertile imagination to keep her company, and it veers toward the morbid. She, too, becomes obsessed with magazine stories of tragedies (Lady Di and Princess Grace of Monaco, for example). Even scarier is when her mother’s best friend leaps to her death from her balcony, or when Claudia learns of the woman who drove off the foggy cliffs near the country house where they vacation.The man thought about it for a few seconds. ‘OK. Go ahead.’ Then pointed to Krishna. ‘But this one says another word, I’m phoning the police.’ Krishna stood watching her, lost in thought until Tarak hit his shoulder. ‘Stop daydreamin. Let’s go.’

During the first year of marriage, she had deconstructed her entire self with the revered language of dead writers. Patched herself with ideas and metaphors until she wasn’t sure where her former self dies and this new self was born. Her mind its own Ship of Theseus” Hungry Ghosts is an astonishing book—linguistically gorgeous, narratively propulsive, and psychologically profound." — Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other I said before that Hans and Shweta appeared to be a happy couple, but something happened before Krishna was born. Something that no one ever speaks about, so life-altering that you must read it for yourself to find out exactly what. (SORRY)

This room, right here, where my wife does her art and the washing machine is on, so I usually have my headphones on. And there’s a window view where I do my long writing, unedited stuff. Sometimes, I just type-type-type, whatever comes to me. I usually do editing in bed before going to sleep. Which is not really ideal, but it’s what I’ve become used to. That is, until an unexpected job opportunity brings them away from their life of destitution. Hans works as a farmhand for Dalton Changoor, a mystery man who leads a life of luxury on a hill above Bell Village. When Dalton goes missing, his beautiful and equally mysterious wife Marlee asks Hans to move in with her to guard the mansion. This transgression of class boundaries sets the stage for Hosein’s rumination on intimacy and oppression in which the Saroops and the Changoors are ensnared in a story of betrayal, trauma, and longing. This book takes on huge themes of masculinity, grief, forgiveness, domestic violence, class and social mobility. Yet, they are all expertly handled by Hossein and provide much food for thought. I would say that the richness of this novel was almost a little too much at times, giving me a slight sense of reader indigestion as I worked at trying to take everything in.