Easy in the Islands (National Book Award Winner)

A calypso singer named Lord Short Shoe consorts with a vampish black singer to bilk an American out of his pride and his only companion-a monkey. An entire island bureaucracy casually confounds the attempts of Tillman, a hotel owner, in his attempt to get his dead mother out of the freezer and into a real grave; stymied, he resorts to a highly unusual form of burial. Two poor islanders stumble into a high-class dance party one night and find themselves caught up in a violent encounter that ...