RaveSalonIn Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, Danticat is interested in history, in politics, in culture, in memory, in violence, in risk, in bravery, in reading, in writing, in what it takes to make things true, and most of all in understanding how the circumstances in which things are made can give rise to whatever great power they might achieve ... It is a thrilling directive, and one that isn’t aimed only at the immigrant writer.
Kirstin Valdez Quade
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThere is nothing undercutting to say about this book, which caused me to weep so many times I failed to finish most of its stories in a single sitting. The collection reminds us, again and again, that each of us has only one life, and forces us to confront the biggest questions: Shouldn’t that one life matter, shouldn’t that life be worth remembering, shouldn’t it be worth examining, contemplating, pursuing in understanding, even though all varieties of understanding are so difficult, so time-bound, so provisional? ... This is a variety of beauty too rare in contemporary literature, a synthesis of material and practice and time and courage and love that must have cost its writer dearly; it’s not easy to be so vulnerable so consistently. Quade attempts, page by page, to give up carefully held secrets, to hold them up to the light so we can get at the truth beneath, the existential truth.
