My ignorance was on my side. I wasn't afraid. I didn't know what to be afraid of. I did one thing, I did another. I did what I now call crashing about. One day I started to write. This collection of Jamaica Kincaid's nonfiction writing, including early pieces from publications such as The New Yorker , The Village Voice , and Ms ., proves what her admirers have always known: from the start, she has been a consummate stylist, and she has always been herself.

From "Jamaica Kincaid's New York," which narrates her move to the city from Antigua at the age of sixteen and a half, to the classic "Biography of a Dress," her cultural criticism, and her original thinking about the meaning of the garden, Kincaid writes about the world as she finds it, imparting her own quizzical, rapier-sharp response to whatever crosses her path. Putting Myself Together is a brilliant, trenchant, hilarious self-portrait of the artist and a testament to how this inimitable, self-created mind and spirit, endowed with wit, humor, and fearlessness, has become one of our greatest, most original writers.