Everything Inside: Stories

“Axa0beautiful book. xa0Danticat’s birthplace, Haiti, emerges inxa0almost mythic fashion. It is a land where a life can be changed, a land that exists both in the past and the present, whose essence may be carried as far as Miami or Brooklyn.xa0The unreliability of the human heart connects many of these stories. If, as [some] stories demonstrate, Haiti takes, others reveal how much it also gives. What brings the stories together isxa0Danticat’s precise yet emotionally charged prose, and the way she has curated this volumexa0to create a satisfying whole.” —Aminatta Forna, The New York Times Book Review “ Haunting, profound—an answered prayer for those who have long treasured Danticat’s essential contributions to the Caribbean literary canon. These eight intimate tales, centered primarily around the diverse experiences of women in Port-au-Prince and Miami’s Haitian diaspora, probe what it means to love a deeply troubled country, to leave it, and to then come home. Danticat’s characters feel not like strangers, but close friends. How does an artist write so deftly from the outside about people’s interior lives? Everything Inside is an answer to that question: This remarkable writer shows us how.” —Alexia Arthurs, O, the Oprah Magazine “Immensely rewarding, clear-eyed,xa0gorgeous. . . axa0stunning collection that features some of the best writing of Danticat's brilliantxa0career. Everything Inside is axa0relentlessly honest book about how we say goodbye; about compassion and cruelty in the face of death; about, as Danticat writes, ‘loves that outlive lovers.’ xa0The reader feels connected to Danticat's characters, but she refuses to manipulate her audience with anything sentimentalxa0or overly pat. Her writing is, as usual, superb. There are no wasted words; she writes with both economy and urgency, neverxa0shying away from difficult questions . . . ‘While we are still alive, we are the ones who get to write the story,’ Danticat wrote in [her memoir] The Art of Death. That is what she has done inxa0Everything Inside,xa0and unsurprisingly, she does it perfectly.” —Michael Schaub, NPR “Powerful, finely crafted. Like Danticat herself, manyxa0in thesexa0stories are members of the Haitian diaspora—they live in Florida and New York, but their emotional ties to Haiti are profound. When a home nursing attendant in Miami hears of her ex-husband’s lover’s abduction, she makes an offer of help—[with] surprising results. A young woman who teaches high school in Brooklyn has never met her father; [now] he’s dying and wants to see her, andxa0she finds something she never imagined. In the final story,xa0life passes before [a construction worker's]xa0eyes; Danticat gives us a warm portrait of the life he made, and she renders his death even more heartbreaking by revealing how his undocumented status will shape it xa0. . . Danticat’s characters have fled [their] island nation, but her luckiest wanderers find their heart’s home, wherever it may be.” —Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times “Impactful . . . Danticat reveals with stunning precision the myriad ways lovers, friends, parents, and even nationsxa0people [can]xa0disappoint, as well asxa0the hard knowledge that shapes their path forward. Danticat’s women, in particular, find the narrow spaces where they learn to live with difficult decisions. Haiti remains a vital presence—when a woman says, 'I can’t live without my country,' it’s as if she’s talking about a vital organ. Danticat writes withxa0spare, clean prose;xa0she lets her words breathe. With an unfaltering voice and evocative beauty, Danticat shows the uncelebrated resilience it takes to move toward something that, if not quite happiness, stillxa0burns brighter than sorrow.” —Renée Graham, The Boston Globe “Danticat'sxa0voice has woven its way into our consciousness, with unforgettable tales of families and lovers—from Haiti to Miami, Brooklyn, and beyond—often struggling withxa0grief, loss, and missed connections. Her new bookxa0deals withxa0marriage and mortality, secrets and separations, as well as the physical and psychological aftershocks of Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake.” —Anderson Tepper, Vanity Fair “Heart-rending. . .xa0Danticat creates an emotionally rich universe.xa0Though the stories in Everythingxa0Inside are linked by themes of love, death, and family, xa0each is distinctive, gripping, and memorable in its own right, creating a collection that highlightsxa0the acclaimed storyteller at her best.” —Lydia Wang, Bust Magazine "Surprising, astute, memorable and vibrant stories fromxa0[an]xa0incomparable author." —Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine “Soulful, lush . . . Danticat’s tenderhearted characters give, they love, they agree to requests it would be wiser to refuse: they are relentlessly all-in. Danticat draws the reader deep into their psyches [and] makes us complicit in their bad moves. These stories, about Haitian immigrants in America and their descendants, turn on secrets, betrayal and accidents, but never feel melodramatic; traumas shake even ordinary lives. Edwidge Danticat has been laying waste to readers’ hearts with her gorgeous prose for 25 years—with Everything Inside , she has only deepened her art.” —Jenny Shank, Minneapolis Star Tribune “Vibrant and hauntingly human.” —Meredith Boe, Chicago Review of Books “Simply breathtaking—heart-rending, exquisite.” —Steve Whitton, The Anniston Star “A book about love in its many forms, and its costs . . . The stories reveal the possibilities—and dangers—of relationships, where one life brushes up against another. Characters bridge boundaries of self, culture and geography, risking much to gain much .xa0. . Good historians like Danticat illustrate the importance of learning from our past, and from one another.” —Abby Manzella, St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Bittersweet, satisfying. Layering unsentimental, clear writing with resonant imagery, Danticat delivers elegant gut-punches of irony. How can and should the artist, the writer, and the privileged among us respond creatively to another’s suffering? How do we appropriately witness someone else’s pain? This is existentialist fiction: our full essence — everything inside — is not manifest until the moment of death. Everything Inside is [a] hallmark of Danticat’s mastery of prose—of the way she coaxes beauty from pain.” —Joanie Conwell, Los Angeles Review of Books “Eight powerful tales of diaspora, love, loss, and in some cases, redemption. Danticat’s writing is language stripped bare, which lets her stories and characters breathe. There is a rising intensity in these stories, from the first sentence of the first page . . . A masterful collection, beautifully wrought and elegantly told.” —Yvonne C. Garrett, The Brooklyn Rail “Poignant, emotionally driven stories by the masterful Danticat, set everywhere from Miami to an unnamed Caribbean island. It's Marie Claire 'sxa0#ReadWithMCxa0September book club pick, so trust us on this—it's a good one.” —Alexis Jones, Marie Claire “Astounding . . . written with the kind of emotional precision that leaves you gasping. We meet a whole cast of characters who feel absolutely real: so striking in their ordinariness, so complex in their humanity. Danticat is a fiction master.” —Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed “Top-notch storytelling.” —Emily Temple, Lit Hub “Powerful and poignant, heartbreaking and hopeful . . . Everything Inside mines the emotional and psychological landscapes of Haitian immigrants through rich narratives that explore the nature of family, identity and home. These are narratives about people struggling to connect—across continents, across generations.” —Julie Hale, BookPage “Rich, vibrant. Haiti is the emotional core of this collection, though the characters roam the world. Lovers reconcile after a catastrophe, a daughter meets her dying father for the first and last time and a family reunites at a baby’s christening.” —Joumana Khatib, The New York Times “11 New Books to Watch For in August” “National Book Award finalist Danticat uses eight short stories to dissect the family unit, diving into marriage, parenthood and young love. The collection tests the strength of familial bonds as characters deal with tragedies of all sizes. Danticat takes readers to her birthplace of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as well as Miami and an unnamed part of the Caribbean in these narratives that probe the intersections of community, compassion and loss.” —Annabel Gutterman, Time “11 New Books You Should Read in August” “Vigorous, compelling . . . Everything Inside provides a storyteller’s insight to how migration to and from the Caribbean affected people’s lives, personalities, and relationships.” —Jianan Qian, The Millions “Internationally acclaimed Danticat returns with a vivid collection of powerful short stories that weave together tales of tenacity, family and unexpected love.” —Bridgette Bartlett Royall, Essence “Vast, moving, and intimate . . . Everything Inside explores all at once the full scope of human experience [and] tackles head on the complexity and impossibility of feeling.” —Kevin Chau, Lit Hub “Danticat is a master . . . In these narratives of unexpected romance, personal tragedy, and family complications, her compassionate sensitivity to the ties that bind us shines through.” —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire “Moving, striking—[written] with powerful grace. A remarkable tenderness is the collection’s most persistent theme. Danticat’s work has always been quietly revolutionary . . . Danticat says these new characters may be thought of as the grandchildren of [those] in Krik? Krak!, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Dew Breaker . In Everything Inside , the characters include people born in America: rather than facing Haiti’s gunmen and ghosts, this generation is navigating more quotidian concerns such as romantic breakups and sending kids to college. Political exile still appears . . . But generally, these are tales of a different exile—of emotional severance and reconnection. In the end, we are left with these characters’ brutal, banal, and beautiful moments, like a wide night luminous, every so often, with firefly stars.” —Gabrielle Bellot, Publishers Weekly “Outstanding; deeply memorable . . . funny, charming, touching . . . Set among the Haitian ‘dyaspora,’ the tales describe the complicated lives of people who live in one place but are drawn elsewhere. Families fracture and reform . . . In propulsive prose, and with great compassion, Danticat writes both of her characters’ losses and of their determination to continue.” — Publishers Weekly , [starred, boxed review] “Extraordinary: spare, evocative, moving. Danticat tackles the complexities of diaspora with lyrical grace. This collection draws on her exceptional strengths as a storyteller . . . She is a master of economy; she has always possessed the remarkable ability to build singular fictional worlds in a matter of sentences. These are stories of lives upended by tragedies big and small; Danticat attends to the ways families are made and unmade . . . She asks her readers to witness the integrity of her subjects as they excavate beauty and hope from uncertainty and loss.” — Kirkus (starred review) “Haunting . . . Danticat once again urges readers out of comfort zones to bear witness to urgent topics—and alchemizes sorrows and tragedies into opportunities for enlightenment.” —Terry Hong, Booklist (starred review) EDWIDGE DANTICAT is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Death , a National Book Critics Circle finalist; Claire of the Sea Light , a New York Times Notable Book; Brother, I'm Dying , a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; The Dew Breaker , a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize; The Farming of Bones , an American Book Award winner; Breath, Eyes, Memory , an Oprah's Book Club selection; and Krik? Krak! , also a National Book Award finalist. A 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner, and the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, she has been published in The New Yorker , The New York Times , Harper's Magazine , and elsewhere. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Dosas Elsie was with Gaspard, her live-xadin renal-xadfailure patient, when her ex-xadhusband called to inform her that his girlfriend, Olivia, had been kidnapped in Port-xadau-xadPrince. Elsie had just fed Gaspard some cabbage soup when her cell phone rang. Gaspard was lying in bed, his head carefully propped on two pillows, his bloated and pitted face angled toward the bedroom skylight, which allowed him a slanted view of a giant coconut palm that for years had been leaning over the lakeside house in Gaspard’s single-xadfamily development. Elsie pressed the phone between her left ear and shoulder and used her right hand to wipe a lingering piece of cabbage from Gaspard’s chin. Waving both hands as though conducting an orchestra, Gaspard signaled to her not to leave the room while motioning for her to carry on with her conversation. Turning her attention from Gaspard to the phone, Elsie moved it closer to her lips and asked, “Ki lè?” “This morning.” Sounding hoarse and exhausted, Blaise, the ex-xadhusband, jumbled his words. His usual singsong tone, which Elsie attributed to his actually being a singer, was gone. It was replaced by a nearly inaudible whisper. “She was leaving her mother’s house,” he continued. “Two men grabbed her, pushed her into a car, and drove off.” Elsie could imagine Blaise sitting, or standing, just as she was, with his cell phone trapped between his long neck and narrow shoulders, while he used his hands to pick at his fingernails. Clean fingernails were one of his many obsessions. Dirty fingers drove him crazy, she’d reasoned, because, having trained as a mechanic in Haiti, he barely missed having his slender guitar-xadplaying fingers being dirty all his life. “You didn’t go to Haiti with her?” Elsie asked. “You’re right,” he answered, drawing what Elsie heard as an endless breath. “I should have been with her.” Elsie’s patient’s eyes wandered down from the ceiling, where the blooming palm had sprinkled the skylight glass with a handful of brown seeds. Gaspard had been pretending not to hear, but was now looking directly at her. Restlessly shifting his weight from one side of the bed to the next, he paused now and then to catch his breath. Gaspard had turned sixty-xadfive that day and before his lunch had requested a bottle of Champagne from his daughter—xad Champagne that he shouldn’t be having, but for which he’d pleaded so much that his daughter had given in, on the condition that he would only take a few sips. The daughter, Mona, who was a decade younger than Elsie’s thirty-six years, had come from New York to visit her father in Miami Lakes. She’d gone out to procure the Champagne and now she was back. “Elsie, I need you to hang up,” Mona said as she walked into the room and laid out three crystal Champagne flutes on a folding table by the bed. “Call me soon,” Elsie told Blaise. After she hung up, Elsie moved closer to the sick man’s spindly daughter. They were about the same height and size, but Elsie felt that she could be Mona’s mother. This was perhaps due to her many years of taking care of others. She was a nurse’s assistant, though no nurse was present on this particular job. She was there to keep Gaspard safe and comfortable, recording vital signs, feeding and grooming him, doing some light housework, and overall keeping him company between his twice-xadweekly dialysis sessions, until he decided whether or not he would accept his daughter’s offer of one of her kidneys. Mona had been approved as a donor, but Gaspard had still not made up his mind. Mona poured the Champagne, and Elsie watched her closely as she handed a Champagne flute to her father. “À la vie,” Mona said, toasting her father. “To life.” That afternoon, Blaise called back to tell Elsie that Olivia’s mother had heard from the kidnappers. The mother had asked to speak to Olivia, but her captors refused to put her on the phone. “They want fifty thousand.” Blaise spoke in such a rapid nasal voice that Elsie had to ask him to repeat the figure. “American?” she asked, just to be sure. She imagined him nodding his egg-xadshaped head up and down as he answered “Wi.” “Of course, her mother doesn’t have it,” Blaise said. “These are not rich people. Everyone says we should negotiate. Can maybe get it down to ten. I’m trying to borrow it.” She wished he meant ten dollars, which would have made things easier. Ten dollars and her old friend and rival would be free. Her ex-xadhusband would stop calling her at work. But, of course, he meant ten thousand American dollars. “Jesus, Marie, Joseph,” Elsie mumbled a brief prayer under her breath. “I’m sorry,” she told Blaise. “This is hell.” He sounded too calm now. She wasn’t surprised by this. Blaise was always subdued by worry. Weeks after he left the konpa band he’d founded and had been the lead singer of, he did nothing but stay home and play his guitar. Then, too, he had been exceedingly calm. Elsie’s former friend Olivia could be appealing. Chestnut colored, with a bushy head of hair that she wore in a gelled bun, Olivia was sort of nice looking. But what Elsie had first noticed about her was her ambition. Olivia was two years younger than Elsie and a lot more outgoing. She liked to touch people either on the arm, back, or shoulder while talking to them, whether they were patients, doctors, nurses, or other nurse’s aides. No one seemed to mind. Her touch quickly became not just anticipated or welcomed but yearned for. Olivia was one of the most popular certified nurse’s assistants at their North Miami agency. Because of her near-xadperfect mastery of textbook English, she was often assigned the richest and easiest patients. Elsie and Olivia met at a one-xadweek refresher course for home attendants, and upon completion of the course they had gravitated toward each other. Whenever possible, they’d asked their agency to assign them the same small group homes, where they cared mostly for bedridden elderly patients. At night when their wards were well medicated and asleep, they’d stay up and gossip in hushed tones, judging and condemning their patients’ children and grandchildren, whose images were framed near bottles of medicine on bedside tables but whose voices they rarely heard on the phone and whose faces they hardly ever saw in person. The next morning, Elsie helped Gaspard change out of his pajamas into the gray sweats he wore during the day. Elsie wished he would let her help him attempt a walk around the manicured grounds of his development or even let her take him for a ride in his wheelchair, but he much preferred to stay at home, in bed. Just as he had every morning for the last few days, he whispered, “Elsie, my flower, I think I’m at the end.” Compared with some mornings, when Gaspard would stop to rest even while gargling, he was relatively stable. His face was swelling up, though, blending his features in a way that made his head look like a baby’s. “Where’s Nana?” he asked, using his nickname for his daughter. Mona was sleeping in her old bedroom, whose walls were covered with posters of no-xadlonger-xadpopular, or long-xaddead, singers and actors. Elsie knew little about her except that she was living in New York, where she worked for a beauty company, designing labels for soaps, skin creams, and lotions that filled every shelf of every cabinet of each of the three bathrooms in her father’s house. Mona was unmarried and had no children and had been a beauty queen at some point, judging from the pictures around the house in which she was wearing sequined gowns and bikinis with sashes across her chest. In one of those pictures, she was Miss Haiti-xadAmerica, whatever that was. Gaspard had told her that some years ago, his wife, Mona’s mother, had divorced him and moved to Canada, where she had relatives.xa0Gaspard had shared this with her, she suspected, to explain why there was no wife to help take care of him. He would often add, when his daughter showed up on Friday nights and left on Sunday afternoons, that Mona also had to visit her mother on some of the weekends she wasn’t with him. “I don’t want you to think Nana’s deserting me, like a lot of children forget their parents here,” he said. “She’s here now, Mesye Gaspard,” Elsie had said. “That’s what counts.” Aside from his daughter, he hated having visitors. He minced no words in telling the people who called him, especially the clients and other accountants he’d worked with for years at his tax-xadpreparation/multiservice business, that he wanted none of them to see him the way he was. Mona usually walked to Gaspard’s room as soon as she woke up. In order to avoid tiring him, they didn’t speak much, but for the better part of the morning, she would either be reading a book or texting on her phone. Blaise called once more, around one o’clock that afternoon, just as Elsie was preparing a palm-xadhearts-xadand-xadavocado salad that Gaspard had requested. His wife used to prepare it for him, and he wished to share the dish with his daughter, who this time was spending the entire week with him. “I think they hurt her, Elsie,” Blaise was saying. His speech was garbled and slow, as though he’d just woken up from a deep sleep. “Why do you think that?” Elsie asked. Her thumb accidentally slipped across the blade of the knife she was using to slice the palm hearts. She squeezed the edge of the cut with her teeth, the sweet taste of her own blood lingering on her tongue. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I can feel it. You know she won’t give in just like that. She’ll fight.” The night Olivia and Blaise met, Elsie had taken her to see Blaise’s band, Kajou, play at Dédé’s Night Club in Little Haiti. The place was owned by Luca Dédé, who, like Blaise, was from the northern Haitian town of Limbé. Luca Dédé, a better-xadoff childhood friend of Blaise’s, had gotten Blaise a visa to tour Haitian clubs around the United States. The gigs had not worked out, and Blaise’s career never quite took off, making it necessary for him to work the occasional under-xadthe-xadtable job during the day. That night, Elsie wore a plain white blouse with a modest knee-xadlength black skirt, as though she were going to an office. Olivia wore a green-xadsequined cocktail dress that she’d bought in a thrift shop. “It was the most soirée thing they had,” Olivia said when Elsie met her at the entrance. Dédé’s was not a soirée-xadtype place but a community watering hole with exposed-xadbrick walls and old black leather booths surrounding the tables scattered in front of the low stage, which was sometimes also used as a dance floor. “They didn’t have one, but I wanted a red dress for tonight,” Olivia added. “I wanted fire. I wanted blood.” “You need a man,” Elsie said. “Correct,” Olivia said, tilting forward on five-xadinch heels to plant a kiss on Elsie’s cheek. It was the first time Olivia had greeted her with a kiss, rather than one of her usual intimate-xadfeeling touches. They were out to have fun, away from their ordinary cage of sickness and death. Several men gawked at them that night, including Luca Dédé, who kept stroking the thick ropy strands of his beard as if to calm his nerves. Dédé had just begun graying in one tuft near his forehead, which kept catching Elsie’s attention. She also realized that he wore the same thing nearly every time she saw him, a white shirt and khaki shorts. Minding the bar as usual, Dédé sent winks and drinks their way until it was clear that Olivia had no interest in him. Olivia danced with every man who trotted over to their table and held out a hand to her. Several rum punches later, Olivia got up between sets, and on a dare from Elsie, Olivia went up on the stage, stood next to Blaise, and sang, in a surprisingly pitch-xadperfect voice, the Haitian national anthem. Olivia received a standing ovation. The crowd whistled and hooted, and Elsie couldn’t help notice that her husband was among those cheering the loudest. “I’ll put her in the band,” he hollered into the microphone once Olivia handed it back to him. “Make her lead singer,” Dédé called out from the bar. “She sings better than you, my friend.” Elsie and Blaise had met more quietly at Dédé’s five years before. Elsie had walked into Dédé’s with an old friend from Haiti, the head of the nurse’s aide agency who had helped her get her visa to the United States, mentored her through her qualifying exams, hired her, and put her up until she could afford to live on her own. The first time Elsie heard Blaise sing with Kajou, she was not impressed. Thrashing his long and limber body around the stage while wearing one of the guayabera shirts and loose-xadfitting pants he favored, Blaise kept singing, along with his band, the same bubbly-xadtype songs and urging everyone to raise their hands up in the air. He would later tell her that it was her look of indifference, and even disdain, that had drawn him to her. “You seemed like the only woman in the room I couldn’t win over,” he said while sliding into the empty chair next to her at Dédé’s. He never passed up a challenge. Read more