This memoir is about Clancy Sigal's boyhood in Depression-era Chicago, then James Farrell and Nelson Algren territory. The author recounts his intense relationship with his mother Jennie, a sometime firebrand union organizer, and his roaring Oedipal rivalry with his mostly absent father Leo. Jennie is a single mother on welfare trying to raise a wild rebellious son in a twilight world between law and lawlessness. She is defiant, vulnerable, sexually...

Percy Jackson is about to be kicked out of boarding school...again. And that's the least of his troubles. Lately, mythological monsters and the gods of Mount Olympus seem to be walking straight out of the pages of Percy's Greek mythology textbook and into his life. And worse, he's angered a few of them. Zeus's master lightning bolt has been stolen, and Percy is the prime suspect. Now Percy and his friends have just ten days to find and return Zeus's...

Fourteen-year-old Myung-gi flees North Korea with his family during the height of the devastating Korean War, beginning an epic struggle for survival that pushes them to the brink. Myung-gi knows war is coming: War between North and South Korea. Life in communist North Korea has become more and more unbearable--there is no freedom of speech, movement, association, or thought--and his parents have been carefully planning the family's escape. But when...

"A deeply reported look at the Chinese immigrant community in the United States, casting a new light on what it means to seek the American dream" -- The deeply reported story of one indelible family transplanted from rural China to New York City, forging a life between two worlds. In 2014, in a snow-covered house in Flushing, Queens, a village revolutionary from Southern China considered his options. Zhuang Liehong was the son of a fisherman, the...

"In March 2014, Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most internationally beloved writers of the 20th century, came down with a cold. He was almost 87 years old, and battling dementia. 'I don't think we'll get out of this one,' Mercedes Barcha, his wife of over fifty years, told Rodrigo, their son. As reality begins to sink in, Rodrigo asks himself, 'Is this how the end begins?' Instead of waiting for an answer, Rodrigo starts to write about the beginning...

"Esmond and Ilia follows Marina Warner's beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English colonel, is still away in the war in the East as she begins to learn how to be Mrs. Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman. With diamond rings on her fingers and brogues on her feet, Ilia steps fearlessly into the world of cricket and riding. But, without prospect of work in a bleak, war-ravaged...

A nascent AI, assisted by droids, continues to edge toward world domination and the ruin of humankind, accepting no limits. It fears no one, except John Connor. The machines know John, now 16, is the future head of the resistance and know of his growing abilities. They must find and terminate him. But Sarah Connor is there, protecting and instructing her son as he becomes the man he's destined to be. There will be powerful revelations, breathless...

"This enthralling story of the making of an American is also a timely meditation on religion and culture. Threading My Prayer Rug is a richly textured reflection on what it is to be a Muslim in America today. It is also the luminous story of many journeys: from Pakistan to the United States in an arranged marriage that becomes a love match lasting forty years; from secular Muslim in an Islamic society to devout Muslim in a society ignorant of Islam,...