Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

From National Book Award nominee Anne Roiphe comes this moving memoir of growing up in a wealthy Jewish home with a family who had money, status, culture -- everything but happiness. While the nation was at war abroad, Roiphe, who was coming of age in 1940s New York City, saw her parents at war in their living room. Roiphe's evocative writing puts readers right in Apartment 8C, where a constant tension plays... (more)

The Temperature of This Water

by Ishle Park

Ishle Park's debut collection of poetry heralds the arrival of an exciting, vital new voice in poetry. In The Temperature of This Water , Park samples the climates of Rikers Island and Cheju Island, 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... (more)

How to be an Alien. (Lernmaterialien)

by George Mikes, Karen Holmes, Nicolas Bentley

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

by Luc Sante

Luc Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums; the teeming streets--scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape. Low Life ... (more)

Reinventing The Melting Pot: The New Immigrants And What It Means To Be American

Reinventing The Melting Pot: The New Immigrants And What It Means To Be American

by Tamar Jacoby

In Reinventing the Melting Pot , twenty-one of the writers who have thought longest and hardest about immigration come together around a surprising consensus: yes, immigrant absorption still works-and given the number of newcomers arriving today, the nation's future depends on it. But it need not be incompatible with ethnic identity-and we as a nation need to find new ways to talk about and encourage becoming... (more)

Stealing Buddha's Dinner

by Bich Minh Nguyen

As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother’s traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled “delicacies” of mainstream America... (more)

Comfort Woman

by Nora Okja Keller

Comfort Woman is the story of Akiko, a Korean refugee of World War II, and Beccah, her daughter by an American missionary. The two women are living on the edge of society--and sanity--in Honolulu, haunted by Akiko's periodic encounters with the spirits of the dead, and by Beccah's struggles to reclaim her mother from her past. Slowly and painfully Akiko reveals her tragic story as a "comfort woman" to Japanese... (more)

The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly

The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly

by Susan Muaddi Darraj

"This sweet, sorrowful book is rich with insight. The Inheritance of Exile tells an authentic story of Arab-American life--these characters are true, expressive, and moving. A fully engaging, satisfying collection indeed." -- Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Origin , Crescent , and The Language of Baklava "These dazzling stories of four Palestinian-American women and their families give us a rare... (more)

Project Mulberry

For the Love of Mike (A Molly Murphy Mystery)

Molly Murphy Series: Book 3

For the Love of Mike (A Molly Murphy Mystery)

by Rhys Bowen

A woman ahead of her time, Molly Murphy is determined to be a private detective. Having inherited the cases of her deceased mentor, Paddy Reilly, she's following philandering husbands, tracking down a runaway Dublin debutante, and working in a sweatshop to discover who's purloining dress designs. None of her jobs seem dangerous...at first. When a woman's body is fished out of the East River, Molly fears it's the... (more)

The Deportees

by Roddy Doyle

Eight funny and poignant stories of immigrant experience in contemporary Ireland The eight tales in Roddy Doyle’s first-ever collection of stories have one thing in common: someone born in Ireland meets someone who has come to live there. In “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner,” a father who prides himself on his open-mindedness when his daughters talk about sex is forced to confront his feelings when one of... (more)

Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration

Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration

"Gatherings in Diaspora" brings together the latest chapters in the long-running chronicle of religion and immigration in the American experience. Today, as in the past, people migrating to the United States bring their religions with them, and their religious identities often mean more to them away from home, in their diaspora, than they did before. This book explores and analyzes the diverse religious... (more)

Child of the Owl: Golden Mountain Chronicles: 1965 (Golden Mountain Chronicles)

Child of the Owl: Golden Mountain Chronicles: 1965 (Golden Mountain Chronicles)

by Laurence Yep

Twelve-year-old Casey is waiting for the day that Barney, her father, hits it big -- 'cause when that horse comes in, he tells her, it's the penthouse suite. But then hr ends up in the hospital, and Casey is sent to Chinatown to live with her grandmother, Paw-Paw. Now the waiting seems longer than ever. Casey feels lost in Chinatown. She's not prepared for the Chinese school, the noisy crowds, missing her father.... (more)

Out of This Furnace

by Thomas Bell

Out of This Furnace is Thomas Bell’s most compelling achievement. Its story of three generations of an immigrant Slovak family -- the Dobrejcaks -- still stands as a fresh and extraordinary accomplishment. The novel begins in the mid-1880s with the naive blundering career of Djuro Kracha. It tracks his arrival from the old country as he walked from New York to White Haven, his later migration to the steel... (more)

A Long Way Gone

Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

by Ishmael Beah

My new friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life. “Why did you leave Sierra Leone?” “Because there is a war.” “You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?” “Yes, all the time.” “Cool.” I smile a little. “You should tell us about it sometime.” “Yes, sometime.” This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s.... (more)

A Place Called FreedomKen Follett

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Top Books

1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Anne Richardson Roiphe