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The eighties and nineties have seen an explosion in the production of short stories by Caribbean writers. After assessing the reasons for such an upsurge, this paper presents the most accomplished short story writers. Women’s writing has been the most outstanding feature in the field of Caribbean literature in the past decades, and this is why it is given pride of place in this study. Although their material is very similar to that of male writers, their treatment differs considerably. The last part of the paper is devoted to what distinguishes writers of the past two decades from their predecessors in terms of their attitudes to language and to the creolization of language.