Published in 2023
176 pages
Juliana Lamy is a Haitian fiction writer with a bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Harvard College. In 2018, she won Harvard’s Le Baron Russell Briggs Undergraduate Fiction Prize. She spends much of her free time baking, because the measuring it requires is the best she’s ever been at anything math-related. She splits her time between Iowa City, Iowa, where she is an MFA candidate in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and South Florida, where she was raised after immigrating from Haiti. Juliana currently resides in Boynton Beach, Florida.
What is this book about?
Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In “belly,” a young woman abandoned by her only living relative makes a person from the mud beside her backyard creek. In “We Feel it in Punta Cana,” a domestic child servant in the Dominican Republic tours through his own lush imagination to make his material conditions more bearable. In “The Oldest Sensation is Anger,” a teenager invites a same-aged family friend into her apartment and uncovers a spate of disturbing secrets about her. Written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms, this is a collection whose dynamism matches that of its characters at every beat and turn.
