When her friend Kristin tells her she is unable to keep her kitten and turns to Jamaica for help in giving it a good home, Jamaica faces a dilemma when her brother's allergies are affected by the new arrival.

A little girl finds a stuffed dog in the park and decides to take it home.

When her older brother refuses to let her tag along with him, Jamaica goes off by herself and allows a younger child to play with her.

Jamaica hates wearing hand-me-down boots when her friend Brianna has pink fuzzy ones.

It's opening game of the football season at Florida Field, and Monk DeVane, a former teammate of Zack Chasteen's, invites Zack and his girlfriend to a halftime party in one of the exclusive skyboxes. But they find chaos---there's a bomb under the chair of Darcy Whitehall, Monk Devane's boss and the rakish Jamaican owner of Libido, a chain of anything-goes Caribbean resorts. The bomb turns out to be a dud, but someone is putting the squeeze on Darcy Whitehall, and Monk DeVane enlists Zack to help protect his employer. When Zack arrives in Jamaica things quickly go to hell---more bombs (this time, for real), gnarly Jamaican politics, and the kinky diversions at Libido, where the prime spectator sport is watching guests frolic on the naked flume ride. As if that weren't enough, Zack's snooping around puts him in jeopardy with Freddie Arzghanian, king of the Caribbean money launderers. Suspenseful, laugh-out-loud funny, and with larger-than-life characters, Jamaica Me Dead is Bob Morris at his wicked best.

A tale inspired by the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley spans decades and continents to explore the experiences of journalists, drug dealers, killers, and ghosts against a backdrop of social and political turmoil.

“In these kaleidoscopic stories of Jamaica and its diaspora we hear many voices at once. All of them convince and sing. All of them shine.”—Zadie Smith An O: The Oprah Magazine “Top 15 Best of the Year” • A Well-Read Black Girl Pick Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret—Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life. In “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In “Mash Up Love,” a twin’s chance sighting of his estranged brother—the prodigal son of the family—stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In “Bad Behavior,” a couple leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In “Mermaid River,” a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In “The Ghost of Jia Yi,” a recently murdered student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in “Shirley from a Small Place,” a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother’s big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital. Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction’s most dynamic and essential authors. Praise for How to Love a Jamaican “A sublime short-story collection from newcomer Alexia Arthurs that explores, through various characters, a specific strand of the immigrant experience.”—Entertainment Weekly “With its singular mix of psychological precision and sun-kissed lyricism, this dazzling debut marks the emergence of a knockout new voice.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Gorgeous, tender, heartbreaking stories . . . Arthurs is a witty, perceptive, and generous writer, and this is a book that will last.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties “Vivid and exciting . . . every story rings beautifully true.”—Marie Claire