What Very Different Places Have in Common

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At a recent event, the novelist Marlon James was asked to name a book by another author that he wished he’d written. He picked Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn’s 1990 novel about the Philippines. Although it is set in Manila during the rule of Ferdinand Marcos, James couldn’t help thinking of Jamaica, the country he grew up in, as he read it. “I thought: She knows Kingston,” he said.