"In her first full-length non-fiction since A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand examines "classic" books from her earlier life, exposing implications both personal and political. A bracing look at reading, life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. "The geopolitics of empire had already prepared me for this . . . [the fact that] coloniality constructs outsides and insides--worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated--in order to live something like a real self." So writes internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand, as she reflects on her early reading, growing up as an avid bookworm in Trinidad and Tobago, and the dawning realization of how the books she devoured, and sometimes loved, also made Black being inanimate. Uniquely and powerfully blending memoir with rigorous and expansive thinking, Brand explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes in famous and familiar books, looking particularly at the extraordinary implications and modern-day reverberations of stories such as Dafoe's Robinson Crusoe; the ways that practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own expression and consciousness. Much more than a memoir, and much more than a literary examination, this is gripping, revelatory and essential reading by one of our most powerful and brilliant writers."--