We're Alone

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 *Just eight essays make up this new collection by laurelled author Edwidge Danticat, yet they leave a vivid impression … It all unspools with a storyteller’s enchantment - and humour as well as fury * Observer *

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.