Michelle Cliff Books In Order

Abeng

A lyrical coming of age story and a provocative retelling of the colonial history of Jamaica Originally published in 1984, this critically acclaimed novel is the story of Clare Savage, a light skinned, twelve year old, middle class girl growing up in Jamaica in the 1950s. As she tries to find her own identity and place in her culture, Clare carries the burden of her mixed heritage. There are the Maroons, who used the conch shell the Abeng to pass messages as they fought against their English enslavers. And there is her white great great grandfather, Judge Savage, who burned his hundred slaves on the eve of their emancipation. In Clare’s struggle to reconcile the conflicting legacies of her own personal lineage, esteemed Caribbean author Michelle Cliff dramatically confronts the cultural and psychological violence inflicted upon the island and its people by colonialism.

Free Enterprise

‘The axe is laid at the foot of the tree. When the first blow is struck there will be more money to help. M.E.P.’ This message was found on John Brown’s body following his ill fated raid on Harpers Ferry. History books do not record the contribution of his mysterious collaborator, ‘M.E.P.,’ but in Free Enterprise, acclaimed novelist Michelle Cliff tells the remarkable story of frontier legend Mary Ellen Pleasant and other extraordinary individuals silenced by the ‘official record.’ A potent and lyrical novel, Free Enterprise brings to life the passionate struggle for liberation which began in America not long after the first slaves landed on its shores.

In 1858, two black women meet at a restaurant and begin to plot a revolution. Mary Ellen Pleasant owns a string of hotels in San Francisco that cater to wealthy whites and secretly double as havens for runaway slaves. Her comrade, Annie, is a young Jamaican who has given up her life of privilege to fight for the abolitionist cause. Together they join John Brown s doomed enterprise, and barely escape with their lives.

Mary Ellen remains undaunted, but Annie retreats to a shack on a Mississippi riverbank where her only neighbors are the inmates of a nearby leper colony, whose memories of a world before the white man live on in their own tales of conquest and struggle. With mesmerizing skill, Cliff weaves a multitude of voices into a gripping and poignant story that forever alters our perspective on familiar events from Harpers Ferry to the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

Into the Interior

In her previous novels, Michelle Cliff explored potent themes of colonialism, race, myth, and identity with rare intelligence, lyrical intensity, and a profound sense of both history and place. Now, with Into the Interior, she has written her most intimate, courageous work of fiction yet, a searing and ultimately moving reflection on the legacy of empire and the restless search for a feeling of belonging. I grew up to be someone adept at leaving, confesses Into the Interior‘s unnamed narrator, a bisexual Caribbean woman of color, and Cliff traces her travels from Jamaica to New York to London. Educated in admiration for Western culture she goes to London to study art history she penetrates further and further into its emotional shadow life in an attempt to overcome her own deep sense of displacement. Reversing the journey Joseph Conrad s Marlow took from the imperial capital to a colonial outpost, she discovers a heart of darkness in the former capital of the British Empire. Moving among its fragmented personalities and social life, she witnesses and experiences its propensity for racism and homophobia, misogyny and abusive patriarchy, hypocrisy and sadism. Deftly shifting between present and past, between a childhood in Jamaica her memories, both disconcerting and humor tinged, beautifully rendered by Cliff s elliptical prose and her purposeful wanderings as an adult that result in intellectual, sexual, and political awakenings, Into the Interior is both deeply personal and charged by a world historical awareness of the persistent injustices that colonialism imposes on its former subjects.

Bodies Of Water

Caribbean writer Michelle Cliff, author of the highly acclaimed novel Free Enterprise, presents a brilliant collection of 10 short stories dealing with oppression and liberation. ‘Wonderfully rich and disturbing tales…
a remarkable collection, a testimony to human endurance and the triumph of the spirit.’

The Store of a Million Items

With a precise economy of language and unsentimental intelligence, these stories show people confronting the central dualities of a complex world: black and white, colonialism and revolution, America and the Third World, and femininity and masculinity.

Everything Is Now

Everything Is Now brings together all the short fiction of Michelle Cliff, featuring fourteen new pieces as well as the stories from her two previous short fiction collections Bodies of Water and The Store of a Million Items.

Cliff, born in Jamaica and raised both there and in New York, skillfully weaves her own experiences into her fiction, exploring race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

With stunning lyricism, intelligence, and passion, Cliff confronts the dualities of our complex world: black and white, America and the third world, past and present, femininity and masculinity, colonialism and revolution.

Touching on such vital themes as memory, the passage of time, familial relationships, the presence of death, and the cross influence of cultures, Michelle Cliff’s stories are broad in scope, rich in substance, and urgent in their message.

If I Could Write This in Fire

Born in a Jamaica still under British rule, the acclaimed and influential writer Michelle Cliff embraced her many identities, shaped by her experiences with the forces of colonialism and oppression: a light skinned Creole, a lesbian, an immigrant in both England and the United States. In her celebrated novels and short stories, she has probed the intersection of prejudice and oppression with a rare and striking lyricism. In her first book length collection of nonfiction, Cliff displays the same poetic intensity, interweaving reflections on her life in Jamaica, England, and the United States with a powerful and sustained critique of racism, homophobia, and social injustice. If I Could Write This in Fire begins by tracing her transatlantic journey from Jamaica to England, coalescing around a graceful, elliptical account of her childhood friendship with Zoe, who is dark skinned and from an impoverished, rural background; the divergent life courses that each is forced to take; and the class and color tensions that shape their lives as adults. The personal is interspersed with fragments of Jamaica’s history and the plight of people of color living both under imperial rule and in contemporary Britain. In other essays and poems, Cliff writes about the discovery of her distinctive, diasporic literary voice, recalls her wild colonial girlhood and sexual awakening, and recounts traveling through an American landscape of racism, colonialism, and genocide a history of violence embodied in seemingly innocuous souvenirs and tourist sites. A profound meditation on place and displacement, If I Could Write This in Fire explores the complexities of identity as they meet with race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and the legacies of the Middle Passage and European imperialism.