A Trip to the Islands

Hear a singular Caribbean voice without leaving Minneapolis. Tiphanie Yanique discusses "How to Escape from a Leper Colony" with Marlon James--Sunday, April 3, at 4:0pm, at Magers & Quinn Booksellers.

Lyrical, lush, and haunting, the prose shimmers in her nuanced debut, How to Escape from a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories, set mostly in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Part oral history, part postcolonial narrative, How to Escape from a Leper Colony is ultimately a loving portrait of a wholly unique place. Like Gabriel García Márquez, Edwidge Danticat, and Maryse Condé before her, Tiphanie Yanique has crafted a book that is heartbreaking, hilarious, magical, and mesmerizing. It is an unforgettable collection.

“I reached the end of How to Escape from a Leper Colony with the exhilarating sense that I had been on the best kind of journey—not, finally, to the Virgin Islands nor Trinidad nor Houston nor London, but to the imagination of a wonderfully talented young writer who has many more stories to tell.”--Margot Livesey, The Boston Globe

Read an excerpt here.

Tiphanie Yanique is from the Hospital Ground neighborhood of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing and Caribbean Literature with Drew University and an associate editor with Post-No-Ills. She lives between Brooklyn and St. Thomas.

----------

Tiphanie Yanique will be interviewed by Marlon James, author of The Book of Night Women and John Crow's Devil. Marlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica. A professor of literature and creative writing at Macalester College, he divides his time among Minnesota, New York and Jamaica.Details are here.--David E