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Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

by Geraldine Brooks

In this captivating book, award-winning journalist Geraldine Brooks offers an intimate, often shocking portrait of the lives of modern Muslim women, and shows how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once-liberating faith. "A valid, entertaining account of women in the Muslim world."--The New York Times Book Review.

Crescent: A Novel

by Diana Abu-Jaber

The Left Hand of Darkness

by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Culture: Book 2

The Player of Games

by Iain Banks

The champion of an ancient, all-embracing Culture in which there is no disease or disaster, Gurgeh beats everyone at a series of endless games, until he accepts the challenge from the Empire of Azad and discovers what the Game is really all about. Reprint.

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

Syrian immigrant Khadra Shamy is growing up in a devout, tightly knit Muslim family in 1970s Indiana, at the crossroads of bad polyester and Islamic dress codes. Along with her brother Eyad and her African-American friends, Hakim and Hanifa, she bikes the Indianapolis streets exploring the fault-lines between "Muslim" and "American." When her picture-perfect marriage goes sour, Khadra flees to Syria and... (more)

The Blackboard Jungle: A Novel

by Evan Hunter

This "nightmarish but authentic" ( Time ) portrait of a high school English teacher and the defiant, uncontrollable students in his charge rings with ferocious urgency and harrowing realism. A timeless rendering of youth culture set against the backdrop of 1950s New York City, The Blackboard Jungle speaks powerfully to the alarming epidemic of violence and security issues in today's schools.

Torregreca: Life, Death, and Miracles in a Southern Italian Village (Italia Series)

Torregreca: Life, Death, and Miracles in a Southern Italian Village (Italia Series)

by Ann Cornelisen

Ann Cornelisen comes to an impoverished region south of Naples, Italy, in 1959 to establish a nursery school. A single, young Protestant woman, she finds herself in a Catholic world bound by tradition, and quickly becomes the object of gossip and disapproving stares. A lyrical rendering of her adopted home and its people, Torregreca is a hymn to the rewards of determination, patience, and compassion. “A... (more)

Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China

Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China

by Rachel DeWoskin

“For a real insider’s look at life in modern China, readers should turn to Rachel DeWoskin.”—Sophie Beach, The Economist Determined to broaden her cultural horizons and live a “fiery” life, twenty-one-year-old Rachel DeWoskin hops on a plane to Beijing to work for an American PR firm based in the busy capital. Before she knows it, she is not just exploring Chinese culture but also creating it as the sexy,... (more)

Torn Between Two Cultures: An Afghan-American Woman Speaks Out (Capital Currents)

Torn Between Two Cultures: An Afghan-American Woman Speaks Out (Capital Currents)

by Maryam Qudrat Aseel

An Afghan-American woman explores life in America as a Muslim, her Afghan heritage, and the future of Middle-East-US relations. Maryam Qudrat Aseel is an Afghan-American woman born in the U.S. to first generation Afghan immigrants. In "Torn Between Two Cultures" she weaves her family’s and her own personal stories into recent American and Afghan politics and history. Her book describes her upbringing in... (more)

Chosen Place, the Timeless People

by Paule Marshall

Down These Mean Streets

by Piri Thomas

Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street... (more)

Asian American Panethnicity (Asian American History & Cultu)

Asian American Panethnicity (Asian American History & Cultu)

by Yen Le Espiritu

With different histories, cultures, languages, and identities, most Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Vietnamese origin are lumped together and viewed by other Americans simply as Asian Americans. Since the mid 1960s, however, these different Asian American groups have come together to promote and protect both their individual and their united interests. The first book to examine this... (more)

Far Afield (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Susanna Kaysen

Jonathan Brand, a graduate student in anthropology, has decided to do his fieldwork in the remote Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic. But, despite his Harvard training, he can barely understand, let alone "study," the culture he encounters. From his struggles with the local cuisine to his affair with the Danish woman the locals want him to marry, Jonathan is both repelled by and drawn into the Faroese way of... (more)

The Tortilla Curtain

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

When Delaney Mossbacher knocks down a Mexican pedestrian, he neither reports the accident nor takes his victim to hospital. Instead the man accepts $20 and limps back to poverty and his pregnant 17-year-old wife, leaving Delaney to return to his privileged life in California. But these two men are fated against each other, as Delaney attempts to clear the land of the illegal immigrants who he thinks are turning... (more)

To Kill a Mockingbird

by Harper Lee

The explosion of racial hate in an Alabama town is viewed by a little girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape.

Where Angels Fear to Tread (Dover Thrift Editions)

Where Angels Fear to Tread (Dover Thrift Editions)

by E. M. Forster

"Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand! Look at this letter! The man who wrote it will marry her, or murder her, or do for her somehow. He's a bounder, but he's not an English bounder. He's mysterious and terrible. He's got a country behind him that's upset people from the beginning of the world." When a young English widow takes off on the grand tour and along the way... (more)

Speaker for the Dead

by Orson Scott Card

I Want to Buy a Vowel

by John Welter

Chosen by Booklist as One of the Best Books of 1996! Guatemalan immigrant Alfredo Santayana doesn't know much English, but he does understand the phrase "I want to buy a vowel"--an important incantation that leads to wondrous wealth in his new land, America. Unfortunately, Alfredo has a lot more to learn in this touching novel of the immigrant experience--a wonderfully entertaining satire that hits the jackpot.

Darkover: Book 15

Thendara house (Darkover)

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

A romantic fantasy set in a futuristic society divided by two cultures, one male dominated and one egalitarian, where the roles of male and female, love and marriage and justice and injustice are brought sharply into focus. From the author of CASTLE TERROR.

Do They Hear You When You Cry

by Fauziya Kassindja

For Fauziya Kassindja, an idyllic childhood in Togo, West Africa, sheltered from the tribal practices of polygamy and genital mutilation, ended with her beloved father's sudden death. Forced into an arranged marriage at age seventeen, Fauziya was told to prepare for kakia, the ritual also known as female genital mutilation. It is a ritual no woman can refuse. But Fauziya dared to try. This is her... (more)

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