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.