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The Conclusion brings together the eight texts analysed in the book, comparing and contrasting the kinds of community depicted in each and the ways each writer utilises the form of the short story collection or cycle as a means of articulating these. It then returns to Édouard Glissant’s, Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s and Wilson Harris’s differing models of association discussed in the Introduction, considering the extent to which the literary portrayals of community examined in the book resonate with these theoretical models. The Conclusion argues that the book’s textual readings demonstrate the flexibility and dynamism of the short story collection and cycle, since in each case the text’s narrative structure emerges out of the writer’s unique engagement with community. Finally, the Conclusion comments on how the book’s textual readings have illuminated connections and tensions between literary and anthropological representations of Caribbean communities, and reflects on the benefits of interdisciplinarity in Caribbean studies.

This chapter shows how the author grew to appreciate how Free to Be … You and Me and music had influenced not only her but so many other children of her generation. Free to Be was so special—it was like nothing else from its time. This collection of stories and music shaped the dreams and ambitions of millions of boys and girls. To this day, when a stranger or acquaintance somehow learns that the author was “The Dionne” mentioned in the dedication at the beginning of the book or on the back of that pink record, a wonderful story always follows about what the book meant to them and their siblings as children. A lot of times, people will just break into song.

This chapter describes how in the last stage of his career Still turned his attention to publishing. Between 1965 and 1978, he published or reprinted eight titles, four of which were books for children published by Putnam’s. The turning points in his career were Pattern of a Man, a story collection published by Gnomon Press in 1976, and a new edition of River of Earth published by University Press of Kentucky in 1978.

This chapter discusses Percival Everett’s short-story collection, Damned if I Do, which displays characters striving to reach an appropriate balance between the wildness of their environment and their largely unsettled lives. With its focus on a lonely hero determined to fight for the preservation of his land in New Mexico and the halcyon lifestyle the landscape would afford him against a planned urban development zone, “True Romance” stands out as the only story in the collection directly concerned with environmental activism. Everett’s poetic universe in “True Romance” is grounded in an American literary tradition that extols the positive values of nature, particularly those of the West, which has often been endowed with a mythical dimension that paradoxically denies it a tangible existence.

This chapter discusses Walrond's final years, which were spent in a London radically changed after World War II. He made the acquaintance of Erica Marx, who needed help with a “Negro poetry” performance she wished to stage in London, the first event of its kind in England. The project rekindled his sense of involvement at the leading edge of a black cultural initiative, even as it faced difficulties in this new London—one in which race relations seemed to have declined over the years. More notable during the latter years of his life was the possibility of a reprint of his short story collection, Tropic Death, published with a new dedication for his three daughters. He would never live to see it in print, but one could not help but think that the prospect of its reissue was a kind of vindication.