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Wingless
- GenresAudiobookShort Stories
magazine
Published January 1, 1979
30 people want to read
About the author
Jamaica Kincaid
85 books1,856 followersJamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua (part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda). She lives in North Bennington, Vermont (in the United States), during the summers, and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 15, 2018
On the link to The New Yorker below one hears Edwidge Danticat read two stories by Jamaica Kincaid:
*Girl
*Wingless
Link: https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fic...
Edwidge Danticat reads both well. I do not hear every word clearly, but she wonderfully captures the ambiance of each story.
****************
Girl begins 4 minutes 56 seconds into the recording.
My rating 4 stars
Girl makes me smile. Listen to the words. Listen to the significance of each. Pay attention to how each is strung to the next.
We have here a mother instructing a daughter on life.
Pay attention right from the start.
****************
Wingless
begins 10 minutes 10 seconds into the recording.
My rating 2 stars
This story flew by me, light and fluttery. Yet look at its title--Wingless! I had to listen to it several times to get a grip on it. Are we in the head of a child before drifting off to sleep? Due to its ambiguity, it fails to speak to me as the first story did. This is more a poem than a short story.
*Girl
*Wingless
Link: https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fic...
Edwidge Danticat reads both well. I do not hear every word clearly, but she wonderfully captures the ambiance of each story.
****************
Girl begins 4 minutes 56 seconds into the recording.
My rating 4 stars
Girl makes me smile. Listen to the words. Listen to the significance of each. Pay attention to how each is strung to the next.
We have here a mother instructing a daughter on life.
Pay attention right from the start.
****************
Wingless
begins 10 minutes 10 seconds into the recording.
My rating 2 stars
This story flew by me, light and fluttery. Yet look at its title--Wingless! I had to listen to it several times to get a grip on it. Are we in the head of a child before drifting off to sleep? Due to its ambiguity, it fails to speak to me as the first story did. This is more a poem than a short story.
June 14, 2018
Source: New Yorker Podcast (Read by Edwidge Danticat)
Confused .... This needs a reread.
Confused .... This needs a reread.
March 16, 2021
I listened to Edwidge in the New Yorker podcast. Maybe I've listened to Girl and read it a few times over the years, but Wingless really packs a punch for me.
April 8, 2025
#Binge Reviewing all my past Reads:
Wingless by Jamaica Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid’s Wingless is a haunting, elliptical meditation on identity, loss, and the painful weight of memory. Told in her signature lyrical, incantatory prose, the story blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political, the physical and the spiritual. At its core is a narrator grappling with a profound sense of dislocation — a woman marked by absence: of love, of belonging, and metaphorically, of wings.
The story unfolds not through plot, but through rhythm and image. Kincaid uses repetition and fragmentation to evoke the psychological landscape of a woman stripped of flight, of transcendence. The title Wingless becomes a metaphor for colonial displacement, gendered limitation, and the aching sense of being grounded in a world where escape — emotional, cultural, existential — feels impossible.
Kincaid’s prose is intimate yet searing, capturing the inner life of someone wounded by history and haunted by the self. The result is less a traditional narrative and more a poetic elegy, a lamentation for all that was never given, and all that was taken away.
Deeply introspective and emotionally raw, Wingless is a powerful exploration of how the past shapes the body, the voice, and the imagination — and how, even without wings, we dream of flight.
Give it a go. One of the finest short stories ever penned!!
Wingless by Jamaica Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid’s Wingless is a haunting, elliptical meditation on identity, loss, and the painful weight of memory. Told in her signature lyrical, incantatory prose, the story blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political, the physical and the spiritual. At its core is a narrator grappling with a profound sense of dislocation — a woman marked by absence: of love, of belonging, and metaphorically, of wings.
The story unfolds not through plot, but through rhythm and image. Kincaid uses repetition and fragmentation to evoke the psychological landscape of a woman stripped of flight, of transcendence. The title Wingless becomes a metaphor for colonial displacement, gendered limitation, and the aching sense of being grounded in a world where escape — emotional, cultural, existential — feels impossible.
Kincaid’s prose is intimate yet searing, capturing the inner life of someone wounded by history and haunted by the self. The result is less a traditional narrative and more a poetic elegy, a lamentation for all that was never given, and all that was taken away.
Deeply introspective and emotionally raw, Wingless is a powerful exploration of how the past shapes the body, the voice, and the imagination — and how, even without wings, we dream of flight.
Give it a go. One of the finest short stories ever penned!!
August 14, 2023
Love, acceptance, fear, drowning? Water, see,
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews