National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) is Anne Fadiman's nonfiction story of a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy. The girl's parents, now living in Merced, California, are refugees from Laos, and their notions of what will cure their daughter are desperately at odds with the American medical establishment.

Kincaid's Annie John (1985) is a coming-of-age story told in eight separate chapter vignettes, stories that span the Antiguan girl's childhood from the age of ten to seventeen. Like much of Kincaid's work, the stories are preoccupied with Annie's love for (and subsequent anger with) her mother. At the end of the book, Annie leaves home, headed for England.

The slim but emotionally intense A Small Place (1998) has been described as an "anti-travel narrative." It's Kincaid's imagined visit by a North American or European...