My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog is a novel told in fifteen stories, linked by the same protagonist, our narrator, who--in her own voice and channeling the voices of others--creates an unsparing, multigenerational portrait of her native Cuba. Though she feels suffocated by the island and decides to leave, hers is not just a political novel--nor just a queer novel, an immigrant novel, a feminist novel--but a deeply existential one, in which...

"Immigrant Experiences weaves together the varied strands of the immigrant experience using detailed historical and contemporary examples that move beyond hackneyed stereotypes about immigrants to give readers a fact-based understanding of immigration to the United States"--

"Set in New York and China over three decades, Paper Names explores what it means to be American from three different perspectives. There's Tony, a Chinese-born engineer turned Manhattan doorman, who immigrated to the United States to give his family a better life. His daughter, Tammy, who we meet at age nine and follow through adulthood, and who grapples with the expectations of a first generation American and her own personal desires. Finally, there's...

"The Chandaria family -- emigrants from the Indian-enclave of Nairobi -- have managed to flourish in America. Premchand, the father, is a doctor who has worked doggedly to grow his practice and give his family security; his wife, Urmila, runs a business importing artisanal Kenyan crafts; and their son, Sunil, after quitting the pre-med track, is enrolled in a PhD program in philosophy at Harvard. But the parents have kept a very important secret from...

Award-winning author Helon Habila has been described as "a courageous tale teller with an uncompromising vision...a major talent" (Rawi Hage). His new novel Travelers is a life-changing encounter with those who have been uprooted by war or aspiration, fear or hope. A Nigerian graduate student who has made his home in America knows what it means to strike out for new shores. When his wife proposes that he accompany her to Berlin, where she has been...

Three films tell personal stories of the working poor--hard-working Americans who, despite effort, determination, and playing-by-the-rules, face impossible odds in the struggle to pull themselves and their families out of poverty. Waging a living follows four workers who are "hustling backwards," working fulltime and even overtime but unable to pull ahead of rising expenses. Rosevelt's America tells the story of immigrant Rosevelt Henderson, who fled...

"From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Moor's Account -- a timely and powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant that is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, all of it informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture. Nora Guerraoui, a jazz composer, returns home to a small town in the Mojave after hearing that her father, owner of a popular restaurant there, has been killed in...