The Peepal Tree Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories, Paperback

Since its beginnings 33 years ago, Peepal Tree has published around 45 collections of Caribbean short stories, reinforcing the view that the short story is the Caribbean literary form par excellence. This anthology draws from those collections, plus a few guests, focusing on work written over the past twenty-five years, the majority dealing with the recent post-independence period up to the present. Though quality is the ultimate criteria, this anthology is unrivalled in its range across the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas, and representative of Caribbean ethnicities, gender and sexual orientations. Stories offer images of the city from ghettos to gated communities, suburbia, villages, the coastal margins. They display a range of contemporary concerns: social fragmentation, political corruption, sexual politics. They display a range of short story genres from satire, gritty realism, magical realism, fantasy, the gothic, the folkloric, horror, crime, erotica, flash fiction, the speculative... Whilst the stories in the anthology collectively offer an insightful picture of both the contemporary Caribbean and of the current status of the Caribbean short story as a form, the overall editorial aim has been to create a book that gives the reader a rich, varied and rewarding reading experience. The collection includes the work of, amongst others, Opal Palmer Adisa, Christine Barrow, Rhoda Bharath, Jacqueline Bishop, Hazel Campbell, Merle Collins, Cyril Dabydeen, Kwame Dawes, Curdella Forbes, Ifeona Fulani, Keith Jardim, Barbara Jenkins, Meiling Jin, Cherie Jones, Helen Klonaris, Sharon Leach, Alecia McKenzie, Sharon Millar, Anton Nimblett, Geoffrey Philp, Velma Pollard, Jennifer Rahim, Raymond Ramcharitar, Jacob Ross, Leone Ross, Olive Senior, Jan Shinebourne, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and N.D. Williams.

Jeremy Poynting is Peepal Tree's founder and managing editor. He first developed an interest in Caribbean writing as a student fifty years ago. He holds a PhD from the University of Leeds, an honorary DLitt from the University of the West Indies (Mona). In 2018 he was elected as an Honorary RSL Fellow by the Royal Society of Literature. He has published widely in journals such as Kyk, The New Voices, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of South Asian Literature, Toronto South Asian Review et al. mainly on Indo-Caribbean writing, and giving papers at conferences (Trinidad, 1984, Warwick, 1986; Wellesley, 1988; Oxford, 1988; Guyana, 1988; Virginia, 1992). His essay, on Wilson Harris, 'Half-Dialectical, Half-Metaphysical' was published in The Literate Imagination (ed. Gilkes), 1989; and 'From Ancestral to Creole: Humans and Animals in a West Indian Scale of Values' in Monsters Tricksters and Sacred Cows (ed Arnold), 1996. His East Indians in the Caribbean: A Bibliography of Imaginative Writing 1894-1984 was published by UWI St. Augustine in 1984. This amateur academic 'career' was cut short by the establishment of Peepal Tree Press in 1985. After years of struggling to manage both lecturing work and Peepal Tree, he was able to take early retirement from his college in 1996 to devote his time fully to Peepal Tree. Jacob Ross has been hailed as 'a writer of formidable technical range and emotional depth'. He is Associate Fiction Editor at Peepal Tree Press. Jacob Ross is a novelist, short story writer, editor and creative writing tutor. His crime fiction novel, The Bone Readers won the inaugural Jhalak Prize in 2017. His literary novel Pynter Bender was published to much critical literary acclaim and was shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Regional Prize and chosen as one of the British Authors Club's top three Best First Novels. His latest book is Tell No-One About This, a collection of stories written over a span of forty years, including from Song for Simone (1986) and A Way to Catch the Dust (1999) and more than a dozen new ones. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been a judge of the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, the Olive Cook, Scott Moncrieff and Tom-Gallon Literary Awards. Jacob is Associate Fiction Editor at Peepal Tree Press, and the editor of Closure, Contemporary Black British short stories.