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Books to Celebrate Immigrant Heritage Month |
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Digital Books in AXIS 360
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Homeland elegies : a novel
by Ayad Akhtar
"A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrantslive in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one--least of all himself--in the process."
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Things we lost to the water : a novel
by Eric Nguyen
"When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle into life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father. Over time, Huong realizes she will never see Cong again. While she copes with this loss, her sons, Tuan and Binh, grow up in their absent father's shadow, haunted by a man and a country trapped in their memory and imagination. As they push forward, the three adapt to life in America in different ways: Huong takes up with a Vietnamese car salesman who is also new in town; Tuan tries to connect with his heritage by joining a local Vietnamese gang; and Binh, now going by Ben, embraces his burgeoning sexuality. Their search for identity--as individuals and as a family--tears them apart, until disaster strikes and they must find a new way to come together and honor the ties that bind them"
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Transcendent kingdom
by Yaa Gyasi
A follow-up to the best-selling Homegoing finds a sixth-year PhD candidate grappling with the childhood faith of the evangelical church in which she was raised while researching the science behind the suffering that has devastated her Ghanaian immigrant family.
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The Last Story of Mina Lee
by Nancy Jooyoun Kim
Suspecting foul play in the wake of her mother’s accidental death, Margot Lee investigates her mother’s past as a Korean War orphan and undocumented immigrant before uncovering profound secrets. A first novel.
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Infinite country : a novel
by Patricia Engel
Moving their family to what they believe will be a safer but temporary home in Houston, two young parents are forced to choose between an undocumented status in America and returning to the violence of war-torn Bogatá.
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The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu
by Tom Lin
Reimagines the classic Western through the eyes of a Chinese American assassin on a quest to rescue his kidnapped wife and exact his revenge on her abductors. .
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Aftershocks : a memoir
by Nadia Owusu
An award-winning essayist combines literary memoir and cultural history to examine her personal struggles with her mixed-heritage identity and the emotional trauma of her mother’s abandonment and father’s dark secrets.
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The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
"The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime reading experiences that you cherish forever. It inspired me as a writer and still remains hugely inspirational." —Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians Amy Tan's beloved, New York Times bestselling tale of mothers and daughters Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
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Notes on Grief
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father."Essential" --BooklistNotes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father's death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page--and never without touches of rich, honest humor--Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father's death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he'd stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book--a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment-a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever--and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.
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Interior Chinatown
by Charles Yu
.Every day Chinatown resident Willis Wu enters the Golden Palace restaurant as a bit player in a theatrical production, but after stumbling into the spolight he is suddenly launched into a world that shows him the history of China and the legacy of his own family and what it means for his place in America.
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Love is an ex-country : a memoir
by Randa Jarrar
A gay, Muslim, overweight, Arab-American woman describes her road trip from California to Connecticut to reclaim her autonomy and explore everything she has survived in life, schooling a rest-stop racist and destroying Confederate flags in the desert along the way.
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The Prague sonata
by Bradford Morrow
“Twining music history with the political tumults of the 20th century, The Prague Sonata is a sophisticated, engrossing intellectual mystery.”—The Wall Street Journal Music and war, war and music—these are the twin motifs around which Bradford Morrow, recipient of the Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has composed his magnum opus, a novel more than a dozen years in the making.In the early days of the new millennium, pages of a worn and weathered original sonata manuscript—the gift of a Czech immigrant living out her final days in Queens—come into the hands of Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose concert piano career was cut short by an injury. To Meta’s eye, it appears to be an authentic eighteenth-century work; to her discerning ear, the music rendered there is commanding, hauntingly beautiful, clearly the undiscovered composition of a master. But there is no indication of who the composer might be. The gift comes with the request that Meta attempt to find the manuscript’s true owner—a Prague friend the old woman has not heard from since they were forced apart by the Second World War—and to make the three-part sonata whole again. Leaving New York behind for the land of Dvorák and Kafka, Meta sets out on an unforgettable search to locate the remaining movements of the sonata and uncover a story that has influenced the course of many lives, even as it becomes clear that she isn’t the only one after the music’s secrets.Magisterially evoking decades of Prague’s tragic and triumphant history, from the First World War through the soaring days of the Velvet Revolution, and moving from postwar London to the heartland of immigrant America, The Prague Sonata is both epic and intimate, evoking the ways in which individual notes of love and sacrifice become part of the celebratory symphony of life.“An astonishing writer.”—Joyce Carol Oates“A treasure of a novel, a deliciously enveloping musical mystery.”—Diane Ackerman“An enthralling epic quest of a novel…Regular doses of surprise and suspense keep us immersed and involved…Compulsively enjoyable.”
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Smalltime : a story of my family and the mob
by Russell Shorto
One of Newsweek's Most Highly Anticipated New Books of 2021 Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America.Best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You're a writer what are you gonna do about the story? Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, &;Little Joe,&; operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town.Smalltime is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, the author&;s great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life and wife in a Pennsylvania mining town. It's a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. Smalltime draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family.But Smalltime is something more. The author enlists his ailing father&;Tony, the mobster&;s son&;as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch. As secrets are revealed and Tony&;s health deteriorates, the book become an urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience.
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Sigh, gone : a misfit's memoir of great books, punk rock, and the fight to fit in
by Phuc Tran
"For anyone who has ever felt like they don't belong, Sigh, Gone shares an irreverent, funny, and moving tale of displacement and assimilation woven together with poignant themes from beloved works of classic literature. In 1975, during the fall of Saigon, Phuc Tran immigrates to America along with his family. By sheer chance they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life. In this coming-of-age memoir told through the themes of great books such as The Metamorphosis, The Scarlett Letter, The Iliad, and more, Tran navigates the push and pull of finding and accepting himself despite the challenges of immigration, feelings of isolation, teenage rebellion, and assimilation, all while attempting to meet the rigid expectations set by his immigrant parents. Appealing to fans of coming-of-age memoirs such as Fresh Off the Boat, Running with Scissors, or tales of assimilation like Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Displaced and The Refugees, Sigh, Gone explores one man's bewildering experiences of abuse, racism, and tragedy and reveals redemption and connection in books and punk rock. Against the hairspray-and-synthesizer backdrop of the '80s, he finds solace and kinship in the wisdom of classic literature, and in the subculture of punk rock, he finds affirmation and echoes of his disaffection. In his journey for self-discovery Tran ultimately finds refuge and inspiration in the art that shapes--and ultimately saves--him"
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A woman is no man : a novel
by Etaf Rum
Three generations of Palestinian-American women in contemporary Brooklyn are torn by individual desire, educational ambitions, a devastating tragedy, and the strict mores of traditional Arab culture.
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A house is a body : stories
by Shruti Swamy
"In this collection of stories, dreams collide with reality, modernity collides with antiquity, myth with true identity; women grapple with desire, with ego, with motherhood and mortality. The stories travel from India to America and back again to revealthe small moments of beauty, pain, and power that contain the world"
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Go home!
by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Asian diasporic writers imagine "home" in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Both urgent and meditative, this anthology moves beyond the model-minority myth and showcases the singular intimacies of individuals figuring out what it means to belong.
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Typical American
by Gish Jen
Gish Jen reinvents the American immigrant story through the Chang family, who first come to the United States with no intention of staying. But when the Communists assume control of China in 1949, Ralph Chang, his sister Theresa, and his wife Helen find themselves in a crisis, struggling to cling to their old-world ideas of themselves.
But soon they begin to dream the American dream of self-invention. They transform, poignantly and ironically, from people who disparage all that is "typical American" to people who aspire to the American ideal. With droll humor and a deep empathy for her characters, Gish Jen creates a superbly engrossing story that sparkles with wit while challenging the reader to reconsider what it means to be a typical American.
"No paraphrase could capture the intelligence of Gish Jen's prose, its epigrammatic sweep and swiftness . . . . The author just keeps coming at you line after stunning line." -The New York Times Book Review
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Children of the Land
by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
An award-winning poet chronicles his experiences of growing up undocumented in the United States, describing how his family and his attempt to establish an adult life were heartbreakingly complicated by racist policies.
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Dear America : notes of an undocumented citizen
by Jose Antonio Vargas
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, filmmaker and immigration-rights activist presents a debut memoir about how he unknowingly entered the United States with false documents as a child.
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The affairs of the Falc©đns : a novel
by Melissa Rivero
Ana Falcón, along with her husband Lucho and their two young children, has fled the economic and political strife of Peru for a chance at a new life in New York City in the 1990s. Being undocumented, however, has significantly curtailed the family's opportunities: Ana is indebted to a loan shark who calls herself Mama, and is stretched thin by unceasing shifts at her factory job. To make matters worse, Ana must also battle both criticism from Lucho's cousin-who has made it obvious the family is not welcome to stay in her spare room for much longer-and escalating and unwanted attention from Mama's husband. As the pressure builds, Ana becomes increasingly desperate. While Lucho dreams of returning to Peru, Ana is deeply haunted by the demons she left behind and determined to persevere in this new country. But how many sacrifices is she willing to make before admitting defeat and returning to Peru? And what lines is she willing to cross in order to protect her family? The Affairs of the Falcóns is a beautiful, deeply urgent novel about the lengths one woman is willing to go to build a new life, and a vivid rendering of the American immigrant experience.
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A tree grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
A new edition of the classic novel, featuring a new foreword by best-selling author Anna Quindlen, follows young Francie Nolan, who is armed with her idealism and determination, as she struggles to escape from the poverty of life in a Brooklyn tenement during the early 1900s. Reader's Guide available.
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The leavers : a novel
by Lisa Ko
"One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. Set in New York and China, the Leavers is the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he's loved has been taken away--and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past"
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Little gods
by Meng Jin
"On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind's arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother's ashes to China--to her, an unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya's memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya's own sense of displacement. A story of migrations literal and emotional, spanning time, space and class, Little Gods is a sharp yet expansive exploration of the aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, an immigrant story in negative that grapples with our tenuous connections to memory, history, and self"
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Our House in the Last World
by Oscar Hijuelos
A Cuban immigrant comes of age in NYC in this autobiographical debut novel by the author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.
New York City, 1944. Hector Santinio is the younger son of Cuban immigrants who share an apartment with relatives in Spanish Harlem. Caught between his mother's anxieties and his father's macho expectations, Hector struggles to find an identity for himself while wrestling with both cultural and personal isolation. Meanwhile, his older brother Horatio falls into the womanizing and drinking pattern demonstrated by their father.
This is a sweeping, poignant tale of the immigrant experience in New York-as a homeland the brothers have never visited exerts an undeniable influence on them both.\
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Sons and Other Flammable Objects
by Porochista Khakpour
While growing up, Xerxes Adams's major life goal is to completely separate himself from his Iranian parents, neither of whom can offer their son anything he can actually use to make sense of his immigrant identity or help him define himself, in this coming-of-age story.
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A replacement life : a novel
by Boris Fishman
Determined to make his name as a writer, Slava Gelman, an immigrant living in Brooklyn, forges Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews until, intoxicated by his inventions, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America.
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The refugees
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer presents a new collection of stories, written over a 20-year period, which explores questions of home, family, immigration, the American experience and the relationships and desires for self-fulfillment that define our lives. Reprint. A New York Times Editors' Choice.
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The namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
An incisive portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life, in a debut novel that spans three decades, two continents, and two generations. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies.
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How the García girls lost their accents
by Julia Alvarez
Forced to flee their native Caribbean island after an attempted coup, the Garcias--Carlos, Laura, and their four daughters--must learn a new way of life in the Bronx, while trying to cling to the old ways that they loved.
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