Hafizah Augustus Geter0.0 An acclaimed poet reclaims her origin story as the queer daughter of a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American visual artist in this groundbreaking memoir, combining lyrical prose, biting criticism, and haunting visuals.
“Hafizah Augustus Geter is a genuine artist, not bound by genre or form. Her only loyalty is the harrowing beauty of the truth.”—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage
“I say, ‘the Black Period,’ and mean ‘home’ in all its shapeshifting ways.” In The Black Period, Hafizah creates a space for the beauty of Blackness, Islam, disability, and queerness to flourish, celebrating the many layers of her existence that America has time and again sought to erase.
At nineteen, she lost her mother to a sudden stroke. Weeks later, her father became so heartsick that he needed a triple bypass. By her thirties, she was constantly in pain, pinballing between physical therapy appointments, her grief, and the grind that is the American Dream. Hafizah realized she'd spent years internalizing the narratives that white supremacy had fed her about herself. Suddenly, she says, I was standing at the cliff of my own life, remembering.
Recalling her parents’ lessons on the art of Black revision, and mixing history, political analysis, and cultural criticism, alongside 70+ stunning original artworks created by her father, renowned artist Tyrone Geter, Hafizah maps out her own narrative, weaving between a childhood populated with Southern and Nigerian relatives; her days in a small Catholic school; a loving but tragically short relationship with her mother; and the feelings of joy and community that the Black Lives Matter protests engendered in her as an adult. All throughout, she forms a new personal and collective history, addressing the systems of inequity that make life difficult for non-able-bodied persons, queer people, and communities of color while capturing a world brimming with potential, art, music, hope, and love.
A unique combination of gripping memoir and Afrofuturist thought, in The Black Period, Hafizah manages to sidestep shame, confront disability, embrace forgiveness, and emerge from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself.
Divya Victor0.0 Curb maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across cities and suburbs of the United States.
Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. Curb witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The book refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous, dark “other” by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith.
Асако Серидзава0.0 Spanning more than 150 years, and set in multiple locations in colonial and postcolonial Asia and the United States, Inheritors paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of its characters as they grapple with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war.
Written from myriad perspectives and in a wide range of styles, each of these interconnected stories is designed to speak to the others, contesting assumptions and illuminating the complicated ways we experience, interpret, and pass on our personal and shared histories. A retired doctor, for example, is forced to confront the horrific moral consequences of his wartime actions. An elderly woman subjects herself to an interview, gradually revealing a fifty-year old murder and its shattering aftermath. And in the last days of a doomed war, a prodigal son who enlisted against his parents' wishes survives the American invasion of his island outpost, only to be asked for a sacrifice more daunting than any he imagined.
Brandon Shimoda0.0 A memoir and book of mourning, a grandson's attempt to reconcile his own uncontested citizenship with his grandfather's lifelong struggle.
Award-winning poet Brandon Shimoda has crafted a lyrical portrait of his paternal grandfather, Midori Shimoda, whose life--child migrant, talented photographer, suspected enemy alien and spy, desert wanderer, American citizen--mirrors the arc of Japanese America in the twentieth century. In a series of pilgrimages, Shimoda records the search to find his grandfather, and unfolds, in the process, a moving elegy on memory and forgetting.
Praise for The Grave on the Wall
"Shimoda brings his poetic lyricism to this moving and elegant memoir, the structure of which reflects the fragmentation of memories. ... It is at once wistful and devastating to see Midori's life come full circle ... In between is a life with tragedy, love, and the horrors unleashed by the atomic bomb."--Booklist, starred review
"In a weaving meditation, Brandon Shimoda pens an elegant eulogy for his grandfather Midori, yet also for the living, we who survive on the margins of graveyards and rituals of our own making."--Karen Tei Yamashita, author of Letters to Memory
"Sometimes a work of art functions as a dream. At other times, a work of art functions as a conscience. In the tradition of Juan Rulfo's Pedro P�ramo, Brandon Shimoda's The Grave on the Wall is both. It is also the type of fragmented reckoning only America could instigate."--Myriam Gurba, author of Mean
"Within this haunted sepulcher built out of silence, loss, and grief--its walls shadowed by the traumas of racial oppression and violence--a green river lined with peach trees flows beneath a bridge that leads back to the grandson."--Jeffrey Yang, author of Hey, Marfa: Poems
"It is part dream, part memory, part forgetting, part identity. It is a remarkable exploration of how citizenship is forged by the brutal US imperial forces--through slave labor, forced detention, indiscriminate bombing, historical amnesia and wall. If someone asked me, Where are you from? I would answer, From The Grave on the Wall."--Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War
"Shimoda intercedes into the absences, gaps and interstices of the present and delves the presence of mystery. This mystery is part of each of us. Shimoda outlines that mystery in silence and silhouette, in objects left behind at site-specific travels to Japan and in the disparate facts of his grandpa's FBI file. Gratitude to Brandon Shimoda for taking on the mystery which only literature accepts as the basic challenge."--Sesshu Foster, author of City of the Future
"Shimoda is a mystic writer ... He puts what breaches itself (always) onto the page, so that the act of writing becomes akin to paper-making: an attention to fibers, coagulation, texture and the water-fire mixtures that signal irreversible alteration or change. ... he has written a book that touches the bottom of my own soul."--Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue
Calling to mind the best works of Paul Beatty and Junot Díaz, this collection of moving, timely, and darkly funny stories examines the concept of black identity in this so-called post-racial era.
A stunning new talent in literary fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with black identity and the contemporary middle class in these compelling, boundary-pushing vignettes.
Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous—from two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids’ backpacks, to the young girl contemplating how best to notify her Facebook friends of her impending suicide—while others are devastatingly poignant—a new mother and funeral singer who is driven to madness with grief for the young black boys who have fallen victim to gun violence, or the teen who struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with black culture.
Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. Her stories are exquisitely rendered, satirical, and captivating in turn, engaging in the ongoing conversations about race and identity politics, as well as the vulnerability of the black body. Boldly resisting categorization and easy answers, Nafissa Thompson-Spires is an original and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.
Alexis Okeowo0.0 In the tradition of Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Nothing to Envy, this is a masterful, humane work of literary journalism by New Yorker staff writer Alexis Okeowo--a vivid narrative of Africans, many of them women, who are courageously resisting their continent's wave of fundamentalism.
In A Moonless, Starless Sky Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony's LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women's basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram. This debut book by one of America's most acclaimed young journalists illuminates the inner lives of ordinary people doing the extraordinary--lives that are too often hidden, underreported, or ignored by the rest of the world.
Helen Oyeyemi4.1 Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret—Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side. In “Books and Roses” one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers’ fates. In “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” involves a “house of locks,” where doors can be closed only with a key—with surprising, unobservable developments. And in “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think,” a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).
Oyeyemi’s creative vision and storytelling are effervescent, wise, and insightful, and her tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation? What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours captivates as it explores the many possible answers.
Рик Барот0.0 That art should once have been marked
with this delicacy: always only one
of each thing made, so that your poem
has its one life on the sheet
you have chosen for it, or the snapshot
of the birthday party, everything
in the room upended by the children's
jubilation, survives only
in the single defended piece of glass.
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, and received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of The Darker Fall and Want and teaches at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Клаудия Рэнкин3.6 A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine’s long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.
Nina McConigley0.0 Set in Wyoming and India, the short-story collection COWBOYS AND EAST INDIANS explores the immigrant experience and the collisions of cultures in the American West as seen through the eyes of outsiders. From motel owners to rig workers, cross-dressers to exchange students, this book examines the rural immigrant experience -- and how identity is shaped by place.
Ruth Ellen Kocher0.0 Review
"Ruth Ellen Kocher's masterful fourth volume of poetry domina Un/blued is a book-length meditation on ownership, dominion, and domination. With admirable dexterity the book both decries power and celebrates empowerment. Perforated by white space, the poems seem to hover above the page, systematically undermining a linear reading. domina Un/blued is at once deeply moving and wildly intelligent . . . a wonderful book--sophisticated, beautiful, and innovative." -- Lynn Emanuel
"In domina Un/blued, Ruth Ellen Kocher painstakingly manipulates verse, visual field, and linguistics to reveal the historical violence and very personal implications of dominion, enslavement, and diaspora. The poems stutter and shudder through their observations toward their discoveries, merciless, feminist, and unforgiving. This is a book about power and powerlessness, and about suffering, about which Kocher is, unfortunately, never wrong." -- Kathy Fagan --Advance Praise
About the Author
Ruth Ellen Kocher's previous books include Desdemona's Fire (Naomi Long Madget Award for African American Poets; Lotus Press, 1999), When the Moon Knows You're Wandering (Green Rose Prize; New Issues, 2001), and One Girl Babylon (New Issues, 2003). Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poets, and New Bones: Contemporary Black Writing in America. She teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Кевин Янг0.0 The first work of prose by the brilliant poet Kevin Young, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
Taking its title from Danger Mouse’s pioneering mashup of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles’ The White Album, Kevin Young’s encyclopedic book combines essay, cultural criticism, and lyrical choruses to illustrate the African American tradition of lying—storytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, “jazzing.” What emerges is a persuasive argument for the many ways that African American culture is American culture, and for the centrality of art—and artfulness—to our daily life. Moving from gospel to soul, funk to freestyle, Young sifts through the shadows, the bootleg, the remix, the grey areas of our history, literature, and music.
Джина Апостол0.0 A young woman pieces together her troubled past in this story of rebellion and romance set in the Marcos-era Philippines.
Soon after she leaves home for university in Manila, Soledad Soliman (Sol) transforms herself from bookish rich girl to communist rebel. But is her allegiance to the principles of Mao or to Jed, the comrade she’s in love with? Can she really be a part of the movement or is she just a “useful fool,” a spoiled brat playing at revolution?
Far from the Philippines, in a mansion overlooking the Hudson River, Sol confesses her youthful indiscretions, unable to get past the fatal act of communist fervor that locked her memory in an endless loop. Rich with wordplay and unforgettable imagery, Gun Dealers’ Daughter combines the momentum of an amnesiac thriller with the intellectual delights of a Borgesian puzzle. In her American debut, award-winning author Gina Apostol delivers a riveting novel that illuminates the conflicted and little-known history of the Philippines, a country deeply entwined with our own.
Сиддхартха Деб0.0 From leadership seminars in fancy hotels to medieval figures walking from town to town looking for work in small town factories; from the naive waitresses working in the mecca of five star hotels to farmers struggling to grow the right crops for the 21st century, Siddhartha Deb's book is the riveting, moving, darkly comic, brilliantly told story of modern India. With the novelist's vision, reminiscent of V.S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness, combined with the modern narrative force of Maximum City, Deb's account paints a portrait of this country in turmoil through the story of its people: aspiring and deluded, desperate and hopeful, beautiful and damned.
Ману Джозеф4.1
Ayyan Mani will not be constrained by Indian traditions. Despite working at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai as the lowly personal assistant to a brilliant but insufferable astronomer, he dreams of more for himself and his family. Ever wily and ambitious, Ayyan weaves two plots: the first to cheer up his weary, soap-opera-addicted wife by creating outrageous fictions around their ten-year-old son; the other to sabotage the married director by using his boss s seeming romance with the institute s first female and very attractive researcher. Meanwhile, as the institute s Brahmins wage a vicious war over theories about alien life, Ayyan sees his deceptions intertwining and setting in motion a series of extraordinary events he cannot stop. Unfailingly funny and irreverent, Serious Men is at once a hilarious portrayal of runaway egos and ambitions and a moving portrait of love and its strange workings. One of 2010 s First Novels to Savor. Sunday Telegraph"
Робин Д. Дж. Келли5.0 THELONIOUS MONK is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist’s struggle to “make it” without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of “bebop” and establishing Monk as one of America’s greatest composers. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos, Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz’s most original composer.
Шервин Бицуи0.0 "Sherwin Bitsui's new poetry collection, Flood Song—a sprawling, panoramic journey through landscape, time, and cultures—is well worth the ride."—Poets & Writers “Bitsui’s poetry is elegant, probative, and original. His vision connects worlds.”—New Mexico Magazine “His images can tilt on the side of surrealism, yet his work can be compellingly accessible.”—Arizona Daily Star “Sherwin Bitsui sees violent beauty in the American landscape. There are junipers, black ants, axes, and cities dragging their bridges. I can hear Whitman's drums in these poems and I can see Ginsberg's supermarkets. But above all else, there is an indigenous eccentricity, ‘a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon,’ that you will not find anywhere else.”—Sherman Alexie &t;br/&t; Native traditions scrape against contemporary urban life in Flood Song, an interweaving painterly sequence populated with wrens and reeds, bricks and gasoline. Poet Sherwin Bitsui is at the forefront of a new generation of Native writers who resist being identified solely by race. At the same time, he comes from a traditional indigenous family and Flood Song is filled with allusions to Dine (Navajo) myths, customs, and traditions. Highly imagistic and constantly in motion, his poems draw variously upon medicine song and contemporary language and poetics. “I map a shrinking map,” he writes, and “bite my eyes shut between these songs.” An astonishing, elemental volume. I retrace and trace over my fingerprintsHere: magma,there: shore, and on the peninsula of his finger pointing west—a bell rope woven from optic nervesis tethered to mustangs galloping from a nation lifting its first page through the man hole—burn marks in the saddle horn,static in the ear that cannot sever cries from wailing. Sherwin Bitsui’s acclaimed first book of poems, Shapeshift, appeared in 2003. He has earned many honors for his work, including fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation and Lannan Foundation, and he is frequently invited to poetry festivals throughout the world. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Каньон Сэм0.0 Through a lyrical narrative of her journey to Tibet in 2007, activist Canyon Sam contemplates modern history from the perspective of Tibetan women. Traveling on China's new «Sky Train,» she celebrates Tibetan New Year with the Lhasa family whom she'd befriended decades earlier and concludes an oral-history project with women elders.As she uncovers stories of Tibetan women's courage, resourcefulness, and spiritual strength in the face of loss and hardship since the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950, and observes the changes wrought by the controversial new rail line in the futuristic «new Lhasa,» Sam comes to embrace her own capacity for letting go, for faith, and for acceptance. Her glimpse of Tibet's past through the lens of the women – a visionary educator, a freedom fighter, a gulag survivor, and a child bride – affords her a unique perspective on the state of Tibetan culture today – in Tibet, in exile, and in the widening Tibetan diaspora.Gracefully connecting the women's poignant histories to larger cultural, political, and spiritual themes, the author comes full circle, finding wisdom and wholeness even as she acknowledges Tibet's irreversible changes.
Uwem Akpan0.0 Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few readers will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.
In the second of his stories published in a New Yorker special fiction issue, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa.
Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent
Хуан Фелипе Эррера0.0 For nearly four decades, Juan Felipe Herrera has documented his experience as a Chicano in the United States and Latin America through stunning, memorable poetry that is both personal and universal in its impact, themes, and approach. Often political, never fainthearted, his career has been marked by tremendous virtuosity and a unique sensibility for uncovering the unknown and the unexpected. Through a variety of stages and transformations, Herrera has evolved more than almost any other Chicano poet, always re-inventing himself into a more mature and seasoned voice. Now, in this unprecedented collection, we encounter the trajectory of this highly innovative and original writer, bringing the full scope of his singular vision into view. Beginning with early material from A Certain Man and moving through thirteen of his collections into new, previously unpublished work, this assemblage also includes an audio CD of the author reading twenty-four selected poems aloud. Serious scholars and readers alike will now have available to them a representative set of glimpses into his production as well as his origins and personal development.The ultimate value of bringing together such a collection, however, is that it will allow us to better understand and appreciate the complexity of what this major American poet is all about.
Lily Hoang0.0 Fiction. Winner of a 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award. At once a fairy tale, a fortune, and a translation told through the I Ching, Vietnamese-American author Lily Hoang's CHANGING is a ghostly and miniature novel. Both mysterious and lucid at once, the book follows Little Girl down a century-old path into her family's story. Changing is Little Girl's fate, and in CHANGING she finds an unsettling, beautiful home. Like a topsy-turvy horoscope writer, Hoang weaves a modern novella into the classical form of the I Ching. In glassine sentences, fragmented and new, Jack and Jill fall down the hill over and over again in intricate and ancient patterns. Here is a wonder story for 21st century America. Here is a calligraphic patchwork of sadness.
"This is an impossible thing, a dream object." Joyelle McSweeney"
Joseph M. Marshall III0.0 A gripping account of the legendary battle, told from the Lakota perspective
The 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn has become known as the quintessential clash of cultures between the Lakota and white settlers. The men who led the battle—Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Colonel George A. Custer—have become legends.
Here award-winning Lakota historian Joseph Marshall reveals the nuanced complexities that led up to and followed the battle. Until now, this account has been available only within the Lakota oral tradition. The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn is required reading for anyone enthralled by the tale of the tragic fight that changed the scope of both America and the American landscape.
Амири Барака0.0 Comprising short fiction from the early 1970s to the twenty-first century—most of which has never been published—Tales of the Out & the Gone reflects the astounding evolution of America’s most provocative literary anti-hero.
The first section of the book, “War Stories,” offers six stories enmeshed in the vola-tile politics of the 1970s and 1980s. The second section, “Tales of the Out & the Gone,” reveals Amiri Baraka’s increasing literary adventurousness, combining an unpredictable language play with a passion for abstraction and psychological exploration.
Throughout, Baraka’s unique and constantly changing literary style will educate readers on the evolution of one of America’s most accomplished literary masters of the past four decades.
Наим Мурр0.0
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Europe and South Asia.
Winner of the 2008 PEN Beyond Margins Award.
Identity, friendship, and a long-hidden crime lie at the heart of Naeem Murr’s captivating novel about five friends growing up in a small 1950s Missouri river town. A contender for the Man Booker Prize, this exhilarating story beautifully evokes the extreme joys, as well as the dark and shameful desires, of childhood.
Young Rajiv Travers hasn’t had much luck fitting in anywhere. Born to an Indian mother who was sold to his English father for £20, Raj is abandoned by his relatives into the reluctant care of Ruth, an American romance writer living in Pisgah, Missouri. While his skin color unsettles most of the townsfolk, who are used to seeing things in black and white, the quick-witted Raj soon finds his place among a group of children his own age.
While the friends remain loyal to one another through the years, it becomes clear that their paths will veer in markedly different directions. But breaking free of the demands of their families and their community, as well as one another, comes at a devastating price: As the chilling secrets of Pisgah’s residents surface, the madness that erupts will cost Raj his closest friend even as it offers him the life he always dreamed of.
Taking us into the intimate life of small-town America, The Perfect Man explores both the power of the secrets that shape us and the capacity of love in all its guises to heal even the most damaged of souls.
Фрэнсис Хван0.0 With a deceptively simple yet graceful style, and in the tradition of Lara Vapnyar, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Gish Jen, Frances Hwang captures the thousand minor battles waged in the homes of immigrants--struggles to preserve timehonored traditions or break free of them, to maintain authority or challenge it, and to take advantage of modern excesses without diluting one's ethnic identity.
In "Garden City," a weary Chinese couple, struggling to evict their deadbeat tenant, is forced to face the aftermath of their teenage son's death from cancer. And in "The Old Gentleman," a daughter becomes alienated from her father when he finds love--or what he thinks could be love--in his old age. Frances Hwang is a powerful talent, and TRANSPARENCY not only showcases her myriad gifts, but also announces the arrival of an exciting new voice
Крис Абани3.5 "Not since Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird or Agota Kristof’s Notebook Trilogy has there been such a harrowing novel about what it’s like to be a young person in a war. That Chris Abani is able to find humanity, mercy, and even, yes, forgiveness, amid such devastation is something of a miracle.”—Rebecca Brown, author of The End of Youth
"The moment you enter these pages, you step into a beautiful and terrifying dream. You are in the hands of a master, a literary shaman. Abani casts his spell so completely—so devastatingly—you emerge cleansed, redeemed, and utterly haunted."—Brad Kessler, author of Birds in Fall
Part Inferno, part Paradise Lost, and part Sunjiata epic, Song for Night is the story of a West African boy soldier’s lyrical, terrifying, yet beautiful journey through the nightmare landscape of a brutal war in search of his lost platoon. The reader is led by the voiceless protagonist who, as part of a land mine-clearing platoon, had his vocal chords cut, a move to keep these children from screaming when blown up, and thereby distracting the other minesweepers. The book is written in a ghostly voice, with each chapter headed by a line of the unique sign language these children invented. This book is unlike anything else ever written about an African war.
Chris Abani is a Nigerian poet and novelist and the author of The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail (a New York Times Editor’s Choice), and GraceLand (a selection of the Today Show Book Club and winner of the 2005 PEN/Hemingway Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award). His other prizes include a PEN Freedom to Write Award, a Prince Claus Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He lives and teaches in California.
Чимаманда Нгози Адичи4.3 Красавица Оланна из богатой семьи никогда не отличалась дерзостью, как ее сестра-двойняшка Кайнене, но именно Оланна решилась оставить полную комфорта жизнь ради любви. Переезжая в маленький городок, где жил и работал ее будущий муж, профессор местного университета, она вряд ли понимала, что бесповоротно меняет свою судьбу. Деревенский мальчик Угву, поступивший в услужение в профессорский дом, тоже не догадывался, что отныне его жизнь изменится необратимо и непредсказуемо. Застенчивый молодой англичанин Ричард, приехавший в Нигерию, чтобы написать книгу, вовсе не собирался оставаться здесь навсегда. А непокорная и избалованная Кайнене вряд ли думала, что взвалит на свои хрупкие плечи ответственность за жизнь огромного числа людей. Но война, обрушившаяся на страну, не только корежила судьбы людей, но и меняла их самих, вытаскивая наружу то, что в обычной жизни скрывается за лоском цивилизованности. Оланне, Угву, Ричарду и всем остальным героям романа предстоит пройти сквозь немыслимые ужасы войны, не раз лицом к лицу столкнуться со смертью и вновь обрести себя после страшных испытаний. Полный напряженного драматизма роман "Половина желтого солнца" рассказывает истории нескольких людей, — истории, которые сплелись самым поразительным образом. Читатели назвали роман Адичи "африканским "Бегущим за ветром"", а британские критики присудили ему престижнейшую премию "Оранж".
Ernest Hardy0.0 Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Film and Music Criticism. Winner of a PEN America 2007 Beyond Margins Award. Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Writing from a critical center that is melanin-based/feminist/pro- queer/unabashedly-leftist, LA-based writer Ernest Hardy (a Sundance Fellow and member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vibe, the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly and more) pens essays, interviews and reviews whose subject matter ranges from underground hip-hop and American indie film to modernFrench cinema; from revealing interviews with Warren Beatty, Meshell NdegeOcello and Les Nubians to an essay on gay rappers and queer rap audiences that pushes beyond the cliches of the media-stoked "down-low" phenomenon."
Харриетт Маллен0.0 Three important poetry collections brought together under one cover by Harryette Mullen, author of Sleeping with the Dictionary
if you turned down the media
so I could write a book
then you could look me up
in your voluminous recyclopedia
-from Muse & Drudge
Recyclopedia shows the extraordinary development of Harryette Mullen's career, in her books Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge, all originally published in the 1990s and now available again to new readers. These prose poems and lyrics bring us into collision with the language of fashion and femininity, advertising and the supermarket, the blues and traditional lyric poetry. Recyclopedia is a major gathering of work by one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing in America today.
Альберто Альваро Риос0.0 –
Lehrer NewsHour to feature segment on Alberto R?os’s poetry as it relates to the U.S.–Mexico border – paperback of cloth edition – cloth edition nominated for all major prizes and we are awaiting word – R?os also known for his short fiction – R?os represented in over 175 national and international anthologies and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music – “R?os is arguably the best Latino poet writing in English today.”—Prairie Schooner
Ричард Бланко0.0 Book Description In his second book of narrative, lyric poetry , Richard Blanco explores the familiar, unsettling journey for home and connections, those anxious musings about other lives: "Should I live here? Could I live here?" Whether the
Эндрю Лэм0.0 In his long-overdue first collection of essays, noted journalist and NPR commentator Andrew Lam explores his lifelong struggle for identity as a Viet Kieu, or a Vietnamese national living abroad. At age eleven, Lam, the son of a South Vietnamese general, came to California on the eve of the fall of Saigon to communist forces. He traded his Vietnamese name for a more American one and immersed himself in the allure of the American dream: something not clearly defined for him or his family. Reflecting on the meanings of the Vietnam War to the Vietnamese people themselves—particularly to those in exile—Lam picks with searing honesty at the roots of his doubleness and his parents’ longing for a homeland that no longer exists.
Эд Бок Ли0.0 Book Description A dramatic debut, Real Karaoke People juxtaposes tradition and pop culture to bridge generations and continents in a way both heart-rending and real. Poems and prose engage readers with vivid and emotional portrayals of
Кэрил Филиппс0.0 In this searing novel, Caryl Phillips reimagines the life of the first black entertainer in the U.S. to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune. After years of struggling for success on the stage, Bert Williams (1874—1922), the child of recent immigrants from the Bahamas, made the radical decision to don blackface makeup and play the “coon.” Behind this mask he became a Broadway headliner – as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields, who called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.” It is this dichotomy at Williams’ core that Phillips explores in this richly nuanced, brilliantly written novel, unblinking in its attention to the sinister compromises that make up an identity.
Jennifer Tseng0.0 This debut collection of poetry by Jennifer Tseng traces the immigrant's journey, one filled with distant families, sea crossings, sweet fruits, and buried violins. Whether remembering a father's "unseen clock, his well-wound mystery" or poetically re-imagining the "autobiography of an immigrant," the speaker in these poems never fails to create a sense of intimacy. Tseng's vibrant and penetrating voice urges the reader to follow her to a "society against loneliness,/devoted to memory, language/the translation of dreams."
"Sometimes poetry feels like a real community whether it was intended to or not. I experience that very much with Jennifer Tseng's remarkable The Man With My Face. I want to be 'him.' Whoever he is or is not--more importantly I want to be many of the people and lives here--the lives in these poems make room for the lives around my life. Met and as yet unmet. Tseng writes a poetry that is constantly vibrant and penetrating." --Michael Burkard
"The immigrant father carries the old country in his own body, and for his children the father's body is always a link to a lost world. In Jennifer Tseng's signature poem, 'Indecipherable Guide to Strange Birds,' two daughters study an unreadable chart where their father s recorded the fluctuations of his own body, and learn only that he is 'a master of codes, king of all the beautiful birds in America.' Such moments are illuminated here with grace and a force of feeling, especially in the beautiful sequence of prose poems that closes this striking and insightful debut." -- Mark Doty
Raquel Cepeda0.0 In September 1979, there was a cosmic shift that went unnoticed by the majority of mainstream America. This shift was triggered by the release of the Sugarhill Gang's single, Rapper's Delight. Not only did it usher rap music into the mainstream's consciousness, it brought us the word "hip-hop." And It Don't Stop, edited by the award winning journalist Raquel Cepeda, with a foreword from Nelson George is a collection of the best articles the hip-hop generation has produced. It captures the indelible moments in hip-hop's history since 1979 and will be the centerpiece of the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration.
This book epitomizes the media's response by taking the reader on an engaging and critical journey, including the very first pieces written about hip-hop for publications like The Village Voice--controversial articles that created rifts between church and state, the artist and journalist, and articles that recorded the rise and tragic fall of the art form's appointed heroes, such as Tupac Shakur, Eazy-E, and the Notorious B.I.G. The list of contributors includes Toure, Kevin Powell, dream hampton, Harry Allen, Cheo Hodari Coker, Greg Tate, Bill Adler, Hilton Als, Danyel Smith, and Joan Morgan.
Faith Adiele0.0 Reluctantly leaving behind Pop Tarts and pop culture to battle flying rats, hissing cobras, forest fires, and decomposing corpses, Faith Adiele shows readers in this personal narrative, with accompanying journal entries, that the path to faith is full of conflicts for even the most devout. Residing in a forest temple, she endured nineteen-hour daily meditations, living on a single daily meal, and days without speaking. Internally Adiele battled against loneliness, fear, hunger, sexual desire, resistance to the Buddhist worldview, and her own rebellious Western ego. Adiele demystifies Eastern philosophy and demonstrates the value of developing any practice—Buddhist or not. This "unlikely, bedraggled nun" moves grudgingly into faith, learning to meditate for seventy-two hours at a stretch. Her witty, defiant twist on the standard coming-of-age tale suggests that we each hold the key to overcoming anger, fear, and addiction; accepting family; redefining success; and re-creating community and quality of life in today's world.
Лан Саманта Чанг0.0 In 1931, abandoned after their mother's suicide, the young Junan and her sister, Yinan, make a pact never to leave each other. The two girls are inseparable—until Junan enters into an arranged marriage and finds herself falling in love with her soldier husband. When the Japanese invade China, Junan and her husband are separated. Unable to follow him to the wartime capital, Junan makes the fateful decision to send her sister after him. Inheritance traces the echo of betrayal through generations and explores the elusive nature of trust.
Lolita Hernandez0.0 “Autopsy of an Engine is the most surprising love story I’ve read all year. The workers in the Cadillac factory who populate this book may not be related, but in the hands of the amazing Lolita Hernandez they become one moving multicultural family. Writing with tenderness and humor she gives voice to the piston crew and the timing chain women, the foremen and the chassis line. Some of these stories just break your heart. I stayed up all night reading and for weeks afterward Abbie, who brought a ghost factory back to life, haunted my dreams. This is a passionate cry from the factory floor, a story you can’t forget from a voice that has not been heard before.”—Ruth Reichl
Full of magic and soul, these 12 stories bring to life the spirits that populated Detroit’s Clark Street Cadillac factory until its last smokestack was airlifted out in 1994. Each story is a tribute to the grit, passion and bravado that transformed Detroit into the Motor City and the Cadillac into America’s premier luxury car. They are also a heartbreaking testament to the decline of the auto industry and the loss of jobs that turned Motown inside out, creating a haunted landscape of abandoned factories and decaying boulevards.
Told from the diverse perspective of unionized assembly line workers and management, janitors and engineers, payroll clerks and retirees, these stories capture the raw and vibrant hum of humanity that found its way into every piston, spark plug and belt, even as the last Fleetwood rolled off the line, its engine purring into the Detroit night. They are about family, friendship, resilience, loyalty, and letting go, but mostly they are about the dreams and magic created in the strangest city of all—Detroit’s last Cadillac factory. In Hernandez’s stories, you will meet America—full of love, loss, pride, sweat, dreams, music, comfort food and engine oil—and, in them, you will recognize yourself.
Lolita Hernandez’s writing is greatly influenced by the rhythms and language of her Trinidad and St. Vincent ancestors, and is tempered by over 30 years as a UAW worker, 21 of them at the Cadillac Plant in Detroit. Her poetry has been widely anthologized and stories from this collection have appeared
Ishle Yi Park0.0 Poetry. Asian American Studies. In The THE TEMPERATURE OF THIS WATER, Ishle Yi Park samples the climates of New York and Korea to present an unflinching, meticulously detailed view of lives cracked open as much by love as they are by overwork, violence, and racism. Sharp street wit and a sensual attention to detail give vivid, palpable form to the lovers and criminals, mothers and gangbangers who live behind the closed doors of New York immigrant life. Within each poem lies a story; within each story lies a whole community waiting to be uncovered. Whether tracing the path of prisoners meeting girlfriends or Korean comfort women or .44s shot from rooftops in Brooklyn, Park's passion and uncompromising honesty lays bare the ruined heart of a city still pulsing with light.
Laila Halaby0.0 This is a brilliant and revelatory first novel by a woman who is both an Arab and an American, who speaks with both voices and understands both worlds. Through the narratives of four cousins at the brink of maturity, Laila Halaby immerses her readers in the lives, friendships, and loves of girls struggling with national, ethnic, and sexual identities. Mawal is the stable one, living steeped in the security of Palestinian traditions in the West Bank. Hala is torn between two worlds-in love in Jordan, drawn back to the world she has come to love in Arizona. Khadija is terrified by the sexual freedom of her American friends, but scarred, both literally and figuratively, by her father's abusive behavior. Soraya is lost in trying to forge an acceptable life in a foreign yet familiar land, in love with her own uncle, and unable to navigate the fast culture of California youth. Interweaving their stories, allowing us to see each cousin from multiple points of view, Halaby creates a compelling and entirely original story, a window into the rich and complicated Arab world.
Суки Ким4.5 Suzy Park is a twenty-nine-year-old Korean American interpreter for the New York City court system who makes a startling and ominous discovery about her family history that will send her on a chilling quest. Five years prior, her parents--hardworking greengrocers who forfeited personal happiness for their children's gain--were brutally murdered in an apparent robbery of their store. But the glint of a new lead entices Suzy into the dangerous Korean underworld, and ultimately reveals the mystery of her parents’ homicide.
Nasdijj0.0 Eleven-year-old Awee came to live with Nasdijj, carrying a brown paper bag containing all his belongings, a legacy of abuse, and AIDS. But this beautiful, loving, and intelligent little boy also had enormous hope for his new life. In heartrending prose, Nasdijj writes about their tight-knit, untraditional family--and the precious time they spent together. This searing, poetic memoir will make you cry; yet it is ultimately triumphant, for Awee got what he wanted most in his short life: a real dad."
Вилли Пердомо0.0 Like a dose of Basketball Diaries, mixed with a Billie Holiday song, Willie Perdomos long awaited follow-up to his powerful debut is a sizzling cocktail of drug addiction, love, recovery, and truth. The familiar East Harlem continues to be his Yoknapatawpha but the world has become his lab in this concoction of dead-serious verse.
Эйприл Рейнолдс0.0 Book Description A dazzling first novel about four generations of fear and longing in the deep South Who're your people, girl?" It's the song of the South, the big question, persistent and unforgiving. Helene Strickland, daughter of
Nelly Rosario0.0 "The circle of myth, history, longing, and grief in "Song of the Water Saints" will envelop the reader as it does the lives of Nelly Rosario's beautifully realized characters."
--Maureen Howard, author of "A Lover's Almanac"
Poetic, transporting, and heartbreaking, this debut novel traces the lives of three generations of courageous Dominican women.
First there is Graciela: a young girl rebelling against the strictures of her poor, rural life in the Dominican Republic in the early 1900s, she searches for her true destiny even as it lures her away from her husband and baby daughter. . . . Then there is Mercedes, passionately devoted to the Church, who rears herself after the death of her beloved stepfather, eventually marrying and moving with her husband to New York City, where she will bring up her granddaughter. . . . Coming of age in the freewheeling 1990s--and bringing the story full circle--Leila has without a doubt inherited the restless genes of great-grandmother Graciela. . . .
The intimate details of life in New York and the Dominican Republic, the broad strokes of history, the subtleties of familial connection amid changing notions of home and obligation--all are rendered with grace and gritty realism in this remarkably accomplished novel.
Виктор Лаваль0.0 Twelve original and interconnected stories in the traditions of Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie. Victor D. LaValle's astonishing, violent, and funny debut offers harrowing glimpses at the vulnerable lives of young people who struggle not only to come of age, but to survive the city streets.
In "ancient history," two best friends graduating from high school fight to be the one to leave first for a better world; each one wants to be the fortunate son. In "pops," an African-American boy meets his father, a white cop from Connecticut, and tries not to care. And in "kids on colden street," a boy is momentarily uplifted by the arrival of a younger sister only to discover that brutality leads only to brutality in the natural order of things.
Written with raw candor, grit, and a cautious heart, slapboxing with jesus introduces an exciting and bold new craftsman of contemporary fiction. LaValle's voices echo long after their stories are told.
Джой Харджо0.0 In Her Fifth book, Joy Harjo, one of our foremost Native American voices, melds memories, dream visions, myths, and stories from America's brutal history into a poetic whole.
Луис Франсия0.0 The first of Luis H. Francia's books of non-fiction to be published in the United States, The Eye of the Fish paints a vivid and detailed portrait of the terror, beauty and insistent humanity of the Philippines of today. Cross-cutting between Francia's recollections of the Philippines of his youth and accounts of his travels through the archipelago over the past two decades, The Eye of the Fish takes us the length of the nation: from Batanes in the north to the Muslim Jolo and Marawi regions of the south, and from the rugged mountain hideaways of revolutionary freedom fighters to the well-appointed salons of the political and cultural elite. Painters and priests, island shamans and small-town politicians, cultists, feminists and infamous first ladies all make an appearance in this imaginative and idiosyncratic exploration of 'home.' Through their stories, and through his own memories of estrangement and acceptance in the Philippines and in the U.S., Francia reflects on the hybridity that is simultaneously the burden and the benediction of the Philippines–and of his own mestizo self.This is the eBook edition of The Eye of the Fish, originally published in print form in February 2001.
Meena Alexander0.0 Winner, 2002 PEN Open Book Award
Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship
Meena Alexander's poetry emerges as a consciousness moving between the worlds of memory and the present, enhanced by multiple languages. Her experience of exile is translated into the intimate exploration of her connections to both India and America. In one poem the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi visits with her while she speaks on the phone in her New York apartment, and in another she evokes fellow-poet Allen Ginsberg in the India she herself has left behind. Drawing on the fascinating images and languages of her dual life, Alexander deftly weaves together contradictory geographies, thoughts, and feelings.
