Bookshelf 2019

Now / After: Stories (Leeds, U.K.: Peepal Tree Press, 2019, paper £ 9.99), by Anton Nimblett, a Trinidadian living and writing in Brooklyn, is a different kettle of short-story fish. Wildly varied in subject, location, and tone, it moves from a Haiku-like visit to Dia and its Serra rust-tinged steels to gay re-imaginings of fragments from Moby Dick, Gulliver’s Travels, In the Castle of my Skin, and A House for Mr. Biswas, to a drag-queen drama set in Jersey City, and a wake in the Haitian countryside or conversations in rural Trinidad. Often intriguing, always interesting, we recommend it.