By Love Possessed: Stories - Softcover

"Every tale . . . introduces characters that will sustain your interest far more than novels with twice the length and none of the panache of Goodison's sparkling prose."--Essence

"A matchless mosaic portrait. . . . A perfect complement to her evocative, widely admired memoir. . . . The voices come vividly off the page. . . . [Goodison] taps deeply into universal experience and offers up these lives with brutal honesty and poignant humanism."--Elle

"Alternating between flat-out humor, aching pain, and the confusion of bridging cultures, [these] stories weave around one another in a rhythmic, engaging palette of language and characters sure to remain with the reader."--Booklist

"[A] captivating and poetic collection."--Library Journal

"Goodison deals with the physical world and the words flung between her powerful characters--she's scoring a dance. . . . It's an addictive game to play, paying attention to the silences in the songs."--Daily Beast

"Few writers are as attuned as Goodison to the heartaches and triumphs of Jamaicans, especially Jamaican women. . . . Fewer writers still tell us so much about what it means to be human."--Elizabeth Nunez, author of Prospero's Daughter and Boundaries

"How Lorna Goodison manages to capture so much about human complexities in these stories is baffling. I just love this book."--Uwem Akpan, author of Say You're One of Them

"A beautifully written and evocative book. . . . Goodison finds a glittering and urgent beauty in the everyday, without shying away from a frank confrontation of those moments when the everyday is shattered by trauma."--Danielle Evans, author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Danielle Evans, author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

This collection of short fiction, inviting readers into a world where people are in turn uplifted and undone by love, includes "The Helpweight," in which an accomplished woman must bear the burden of an old flame's renewed affections when he returns from a life abroad with his Irish bride in tow. Original. 15,000 first printing.