ROBERT ANTONI
A CULT CLASSIC!
Antoni isn't writing literature with Cut Guavas. He's cutting it open, sinking under the skin, pumping new blood into the veins, and shaping it into unimaginable forms.
--MARLON JAMES
Trinidad-born Austin Stoker has become one of the first successful black actors in Hollywood, known for his early action film, Assault on Precinct 13, directed by John Carpenter. Now, at 83 years-of-age, Stoker stars in the sequal to another of his early blockbuster hits, Assault on the Civilization of the Simians. While portraying his older self in the ape world of Postscript, set in 2680 AD, Stioker stumbles onto the "film-within-the-film"--the story of his own origins in 1940's Port of Spain as the result of a salacious and clandestine love affair.
A CHARLATAN INVENTOR!
HIS HAPLESS FOLLOWERS!
A ROMANCE ABOARD SHIP!
Winner of the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Best Caribbean Novel
A marvel of a novel, layered in histories, As Flies to Whatles Boys is an unforgetable and matchless work of fiction..
--EDWIDGE DANTICAT
Guggenheim Fellowship Winner
In 1845 London, J.A. Etzler has invented revolutionary machines, powered by the immense fores of Mother Nature. He establishes the Tropical Emigration Society, and his followers set sail for Trinidad. Aboard ship, young Willy Tucker is interested in little more than pursuing the equisite and wise Margarete Whitechurch. As she predics, Etzler's machines will never work, and rather than utopia and wordly riches, the pioneers must face an uninhabitable swampland, starvation and the Black Vomit. Tragedy played out against a background of youthful romance.
HEMMINGWAY CROSSDRESSED!
Antoni has pulled off a stunning and original literary feat: elevating Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises to archetypal status and then brilliantly dismantle it in the light of the twenty-first century zeitgeist. A meditation on race, sexuality, belief systems, and fiction itself.
--ROBERT OLEN BUTLER
A FOWLMOUTHED GRANNY!
A MASTER STORYTELLER!
The tales are bawdy, hilarious and magical--if only all grannies could be like this!
--THE TIMES (LONDON)
Antoni's rhythmic sentences, dazzling imagination and descriptive powers seduced me utterly!
--THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
During World War II, an American military base is established in Trinidad, and the island changes face overnight--not in dedication to the war effort, but in "service" of the newly arrived soldiers. Prostitutes decend on Port of Spain, gambling dens flourish, together with all maner of debauchery. Granny Myna's six boys are all in medical school in Canada, their bedrooms vacant, her large home empty. With the General's encouragement--and to pocket some cash of her own--she takes in boarders, a motley crew who soon become like own sons. Everynight, in an attempt to keep "her boys" out of the brothels, she tells them stories--tales enticing and adventurous enough to defeat the temptations waiting beyond her door.
TWO WOMEN - ONE BLACK, ONE WHITE - AN UNBORN CHILD -THEIR INTERTWINED STORIES
RobertAntoni's new book, Blessed is the Fruit, is so rich, so lush, so intoxicatingly gorgeous that, like a handful of my favorite books--One Hundred Years of Solitude, Beloved, The House of the Spirits--I will be savoring it for years to come.
--CRISTINA GARCIA
A FROGCHILD - A MIRACULOUS BLACK MADONNA - A CARIBBEAN MYTH
Winner of the 1992 Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel
Trinidad, indeed the entire West Indies, has its James Joyce!
--GEORGE PLIMPTON
Winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant
ROBERT ANTONI is equal parts Trinbagonian, Bahamian, and US citizen. His fictional world is the British West Indies—the region’s history, geography, mythology, folklore, and above all its vernacular languages. His books have been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, an NEA, the BOCAS prize for Best Book from the Caribbean, the Aga Kahn Prize from the Paris Review, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Trinidad & Tobago National Library. Antoni's work has been translated into five languages. He holds an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, an MFA and PhD from the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. Antoni has taught in writing programs across the United States, and he presently teaches in the Pan-European MFA for Creative Writing, with alternating residencies in Barcelona, Vienna, and Dublin.
Literary Agent: Kim Witherspoon