Read Around North America Challenge
Read at least one book by an author from each country in North America.
Best books from North America (1137)
511.
Sounding Ground by Vladimir Lucien EN
Country: North America / 
St. Lucia
St. Lucia
Description:
Winner of: 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Vladimir Lucien is a young poet with so many gifts; his poetry is intelligent, musical, gritty in observation, graceful in method. His poems contain stories of ancestors, immediate family, the history embedded in his language choices as a St Lucian writer, and heroes such as Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, Kamau Brathwaite, and a local steelbandsman. Although never overtly political, there's an oblique and often witty politics embedded in the poems, as where observing the rise of a grandfather out of rural poverty into the style of coloni... continue
512.
Neg Maron : Freedom Fighter by Michael Aubertin EN
Country: North America / St. Lucia
St. Lucia
Description:
"Neg Maron: Freedom Fighter is a captivating piece of Caribbean literature set on the enchanting island of St. Lucia, West Indies. As the title suggests, Neg Maron: Freedom Fighter explores, among other things, the physical and psychological struggle fro emancipation."-- Foreword (p. ix).
513.
Silk Cotton & Other Trees : Poems by Hazel Simmons-McDonald EN
Country: North America / St. Lucia
St. Lucia
Description:
Hazel Simmonds-McDonald, a writer whose works have previously appeared in such notable journals as Savacou, The Literary Review and The Atlanta Review, provides poetry lovers with a rare treat with her debut novel of collected power, Silk Cotton and Other Trees.Artistically inspired, her poems are textured works of sound and rhythm which reveal a true ear for cadence. There is a refreshing experimentation with form and metre, ranging from the skilful manipulation of the traditional sonnet forms to free verse and prose poetry. In content, the themes are occasionally haunting and unsettling, for... continue
514.
Night Vision : Poems by Kendel Hippolyte EN
Country: North America / St. Lucia
St. Lucia
Description:
Because we see with history, it is difficult to see through it. And yet we must or we become it, become nothing else but history. It is this challenge, laid down in the powerful title poem of this collection, which Kendel Hippolyte takes up in Night Vision. And the history that Hippolyte penetrates is a history of the change overtaking the island of St. Lucia. As town becomes city and city spreads like a cancer, the poet's searching verse finds among the waste of humanity, nature, and culture a microcosm of the transforming Caribbean-from tradition, community, rooted identity, to social fragme... continue
515.
White Egrets by Derek Walcott EN
Country: North America / St. Lucia
St. Lucia
Description:
A DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career—the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the passing of time, the always strange joys of new love, and the sometimes terrifying beauty of the natural world—with an intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott creates an almost surflike cadence, broadening the possibilities of rhyme and ... continue
516.
Dream on Monkey Mountain : And Other Plays by Derek Walcott EN
Country: North America / St. Lucia
St. Lucia
Description:
On a Caribbean island, the morning after a full moon, Felix Hobain tears through the market in a drunken rage. Taken away to sober up in jail, all that night he is gripped by hallucinations: the impoverished hermit believes he has become a healer, walking from village to village, tending to the sick, waiting for a sign from God. In this dream, his one companion, Moustique, wants to exploit his power. Moustique decides to impersonate a prophet himself, ignoring a coffin-maker who warns him he will die and enraging the people of the island. Hobain, half-awake in his desolate jail cell, terrorize... continue
517.
518.
Shades of Grey by Garth St. Omer EN
Country: North America / St. Lucia
St. Lucia
Description:
As Stephenson, who almost accidentally finds himself as a mature student at university, comes closer to his girl-friend Thea, with her easy talk of her family, he has to acknowledge that he has never known his father, not lived with his mother, and cannot remember what his grandparents looked like. He knows, too, that his failure to come clean about a disreputable episode in his past threatens their relationship. The Lights on the Hill, the first of two interdependent short novels in Shades of Grey, is a moving and inward portrait of a man trying in his halting way to construct his own story. ... continue
519.
Country: North America / St. Lucia
St. Lucia
Description:
"Eugene Coard is woken one morning by a phone call to report the murder of a former St. Lucian friend. It throws him back to memories of their island days, and his complicated love life in London that made necessary his relocation to the USA. Thoughts about his friend's metamorphosis from middle-class "CB" to criminal, ghetto-dwelling "Red" provoke Eugene to review his own so far profitable transformations. But just how much of Eugene's story can we believe? His confessions reveal him as probably the most unreliable and devious narrator in Caribbean fiction; has he, as a writer and psychiatris... continue
520.
Country: North America / St. Lucia
St. Lucia
Description:
Most of the poems in this sequence of fifty where written in close succession during one summer in Trinidad. Their principle themes are the relationship of poetry to painting, the stasis of midsummer in the tropics, and the pull of the sea, family and friendship. Walcott records the experience of middle life - in reality and in memory or the imagination. On the publication of Derek Walcott's previous collection, The Fortunate Traveller, Blake Morrison wrote in the London Review of Books: ' The Forunate Traveller is an impressive collection that moves lucidly and at times brilliantly between ab... continue