The Caribbean area—a scattering of ethnic and racial groups with a history of colonialism and bloody attempts to assert nationhood—provides an exciting background for these tales of wit, melancholy, resentment, fantasy, and superstition. If the Caribbeans are searching for a "newness," a "cool upheaval of the spirit," as Salkey suggests in the introduction, then the writers gathered together here—from the outstanding such as V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, and John Hearne to the younger, little-known, and never before published—are true to this spirit.