Background
Phillips, Caryl was born on March 13, 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies.
(In this richly descriptive and haunting narrative, Caryl ...)
In this richly descriptive and haunting narrative, Caryl Phillips chronicles a journey through modern-day Europe, his quest guided by a moral compass rather than a map. Seeking personal definition within the parameters of growing up black in Europe, he discovers that the natural loneliness and confusion inherent in long jorneys collides with the bigotry of the "European Tribe"-a global community of whites caught up in an unyielding, Eurocentric history. Phillips deftly illustrates the scenes and characters he encounters, from Casablanca and Costa del Sol to Venice, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Moscow. He ultimately discovers that "Europe is blinded by her past, and does not understand the high price of her churches, art galleries, and history as the prison from which Europeans speak." In the afterword to the Vintage edition, Phillips revisits the Europe he knew as a young man and offers fresh observations.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375707042/?tag=2022091-20
( From one of our most admired fiction writers: the seari...)
From one of our most admired fiction writers: the searing story of breakdown and recovery in the life of one man and of a society moving from one idea of itself to another. Keith—born in England in the early 1960s to immigrant West Indian parents but primarily raised by his white stepmother—is a social worker heading a Race Equality unit in London whose life has come undone. He is separated from his wife of twenty years, kept at arm’s length by his teenage son, estranged from his father, and accused of harassment by a coworker. And beneath it all, he has a desperate feeling that his work—even in fact his life—is no longer relevant. Deeply moving in its portrayal of the vagaries of family love and bold in its scrutiny of the personal politics of race, this is Caryl Phillips’s most powerful novel yet.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030747383X/?tag=2022091-20
(As nineteen-year-old Leila surveys her island home from t...)
As nineteen-year-old Leila surveys her island home from the ship that will carry her, her husband, and baby to England, she contemplates the Caribbean life of the 1950s that is chaotic, hand-to-mouth, and offers no way but out.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067975931X/?tag=2022091-20
(In Higher Ground, Caryl Phillips presents three character...)
In Higher Ground, Caryl Phillips presents three characters separated by time and distance but united by the profound sympathy he has for their humanity. In the first story, a young West African is oppressed by the shadow of slavery; in the second an African-American fights to survive solitary confinement without sacrificing his integrity; in the third a Polish refugee struggles to ward off the increasing isolation of a life in exile.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679763767/?tag=2022091-20
(Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved...)
Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved to a housing estate in a small village. Solomon is a night-watchman, an immigrant from an unnamed country in Africa. Each is desperate for love. And yet each harbors secrets that may make attaining it impossible. With breathtaking assurance and compassion, Caryl Phillips retraces the paths that lead Dorothy and Solomon to their meeting point: her failed marriage and ruinous obsession with a younger man, the horrors he witnessed as a soldier in his disintegrating native land, and the cruelty he encounters as a stranger in his new one. Intimate and panoramic, measured and shattering, A Distant Shore charts the oceanic expanses that separate people from their homes, their hearts, and their selves.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400034507/?tag=2022091-20
(From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious...)
From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa. It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant range of voices and narrative techniques, Caryl Phillips folows these exiles across the river that separates continents and centuries. Phillips's characters include a freed slave who journeys to Liberia as a missionary in the 1830s; a pioneer woman seeking refuge from the white man's justice on the Colorado frontier; and an African-American G.I. who falls in love with a white Englishwoman during World War II. Together these voices make up a "many-tongued chorus" of common memory—and one of the most stunning works of fiction ever to address the lives of black people severed from their homeland.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679757945/?tag=2022091-20
(A searing new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragi...)
A searing new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragic, little-known life of Bert Williams (1874—1922), the first black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune. Even as an eleven-year-old child living in Southern California in the late 1800s–his family had recently emigrated from the Bahamas–Bert Williams understood that he had to “learn the role that America had set aside for him.” At the age of twenty-two, after years of struggling for success on the stage, he made the radical decision to do his own “impersonation of a negro”: he donned blackface makeup and played the “coon” as a character. Behind this mask, he became a Broadway headliner, starring in the Ziegfeld Follies for eight years and leading his own musical theater company–as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields. Williams was a man of great intelligence, elegance, and dignity, but the barriers he broke down onstage continued to bear heavily on his personal life, and the contradictions between the man he was and the character he played were increasingly irreconcilable for him. W. C. Fields called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew,” and it is this dichotomy at Williams’s core that Caryl Phillips illuminates in a richly nuanced, brilliantly written narrative. The story of a single life, Dancing in the Dark is also a novel about the tragedies of race and identity, and the perils of self-invention, that have long plagued American culture. Powerfully emotional and moving, it is Caryl Phillips’s most accomplished novel yet.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400043964/?tag=2022091-20
Phillips, Caryl was born on March 13, 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies.
Bachelor with honors, The Queen's College, Oxford, England, 1979. AM (honorary), Amherst College, Massachusetts, 1995. DUniv (honorary), Leeds Metro.
University, 1997; Doctor (honorary), University York, 2003. Doctor of Letters (honorary), University Leeds, 2003. AM (honorary), Yale University, 2006.
Writer in residence Factory Arts Center Arts Council Great Britain, London, 1980-1982. Writer in residence University Mysore, India, 1987, University Stockholm, 1989. Visiting writer Amherst College, 1990-1992, writer in residence, 1992—1998, co-director creative writing center, 1994-1997, professor English, writer-in-residence, 1994-1998.
Professor English, Henry R. Luce professor migration and social order Barnard College, Columbia University, New York City, 1998—2005, director Initiatives in the Humanities, 2003—2005. Professor English Yale University, since 2005. Visiting lecturer University Ghana, 1990, University Poznan, 1991.
Visiting writer Humber College, 1992, 93. Writer-in-residence National Institute Education, Singapore, 1994. Visiting professor English New York University, 1993, Oxford University, 2009.
Visiting professor humanities University Würzburg.I., 1999—2000. Member arts council Great Britain Drama Panel, 1982—1985. Member production board British Film Institute, 1985—1988, Bush Theatre, 1985—1989.
Member Caribbean Writer board United States Virgin Islands, since 1989. Honorary senior member University Kent, since 1988. Consultant editor Faber & Faber, Inc., 1992—1994, Caribbean series editor, 1996—2000.
Participant, keynote Speaker 12 annual conferences German-speaking countries New Lits. in English, Giessen, Germany, 1989. Resident writer Hull (Engl.) International Literature Festival, 1992. Instructor writing Arvon Foundation, summers, since 1983.
Reader, lecturer in field.
(As nineteen-year-old Leila surveys her island home from t...)
(A searing new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragi...)
( From one of our most admired fiction writers: the seari...)
(In this richly descriptive and haunting narrative, Caryl ...)
(In Higher Ground, Caryl Phillips presents three character...)
(From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious...)
(Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved...)
(A novel from the author of HIGHER GROUND and THE FINAL PA...)
(LA NATURALEZA DE LA SANGRE)
(Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include compa...)
(Book by Phillips, Caryl)
(Book by Phillips, Caryl)