We're Alone

a Roxane Gay Book Club Pick, 2024

Author: Edwidge Danticat

A collection of exceptional new essays by one of the most significant contemporary writers on the world stage.

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Summary

A collection of exceptional new essays by one of the most significant contemporary writers on the world stage.

Description

'Danticat offers an invaluable primer to the Haitian American experience in all its inherited trauma. Arguably she does for the Haitian diaspora what Junot Diaz has done for Dominican Americans' TLS

Shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Nonfiction

'Danticat's observations feel more like a guide to living - a testament to what writers can offer in difficult times' Tinbete Ermyas, NPR Best Books of 2024

Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat's childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We're Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience.

From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides in both tragedies and triumphs.

Danticat is an irresistible presence on the page: full of heart, outrage, humor, clear thinking, and moral questioning, while reminding us of the possibilities of community. And so "we're alone" is both a fearsome admission and an intimate invitation-we're alone now, we can talk. We're Alone is a book that asks us to think through some of the world's intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.

PRAISE FOR EDWIDGE DANTICAT

'In Danticat's hands, with great tenderness, these hidden lives are moved away from the margins' TLS

'Stunning ruminations on the Haitian diaspora identity, as well as the layered complexities of seeking hope after tragedy . . . Read it, you will not be disappointed' Bad Form

Critic Reviews

Edwidge Danticat is agile when juggling duality. It's a core feature of We're Alone, her essay collection that strives for a "kind of aloneness/togetherness." The title is a nod to both the isolation that life can make us feel and intimacy between reader and writer. And that duality governs so much of what Danticat confronts - displacement, gun violence, hurricanes, political tumult. Things that can end you, or make you anew. "Part of my job as a writer is to wrestle with mortality, both my own and that of others," she writes. And yet Danticat's observations feel more like a guide to living - a testament to what writers can offer in difficult times. -- Tinbete Ermyas NPR (Best Books of 2024)
The essays - lucid, unaffected, peppered with Creole proverbs - move from the personal to the political, and from local to global contexts, with convincing ease. Danticat offers an invaluable primer to the Haitian American experience in all its inherited trauma. Arguably she does for the Haitian diaspora what Junot Díaz has done for Dominican Americans TLS

About the Author

Edwidge Danticat is the author of Everything Inside, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Award finalist in criticism. She is the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University.