Product Description: In the summer of 2012, the author returned to his native Cuba to retrieve his birth certificate after an absence of 50 years (for the first 24 of which he lived in the United States). This memoir of his journey of personal and political discovery illuminates how the two countries--90 miles apart yet opposites on the political spectrum--have both lost their way in the misguided pursuit of their divergent ideologies...read more

A searing story of starvation and survival in North Korea, followed by a dramatic escape, rescue by activists and Christian missionaries, and success in the United States thanks to newfound faith and courage Inside the hidden and mysterious world of North Korea, Joseph Kim lived a young boy’s normal life until he was five. Then disaster struck: the first wave of the Great Famine, a long, terrible ordeal that killed millions, including his father, and sent others, like his mother and only sister, on desperate escape routes into China. Alone on the streets, Joseph learned to beg and steal. He had nothing but a street-hardened survival instinct. Finally, in desperation, he too crossed a frozen river to escape to China. There a kindly Christian woman took him in, kept him hidden from the authorities, and gave him hope. Soon, through an underground network of activists, he was spirited to the American consulate, and became one of just a handful of North Koreans to be brought to the U.S. as refugees. Joseph knew no English and had never been a good student. Yet the kindness of his foster family changed his life.  He turned a new leaf, became a dedicated student, mastered English, and made it to college, where he is now thriving thanks to his faith and inner strength. Under the Same Sky is an unforgettable story of suffering and redemption.

[Read by Karen Cass] The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators -- her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy -- the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father. As she gradually learned about the extent of her father's brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet and in 1967 shocked the world by defecting to the United States -- leaving her two children behind. But although she was never a part of her father's regime, she could not escape his legacy. Her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty in Spring Green, Wisconsin. With access to KGB, CIA, and Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana's daughter, Rosemary Sullivan pieces together Svetlana's incredible life in a masterful account of unprecedented intimacy. Epic in scope, it's a revolutionary biography of a woman doomed to be a political prisoner of her father's name. Sullivan explores a complicated character in her broader context without ever losing sight of her powerfully human story, in the process opening a closed, brutal world that continues to fascinate us.

Product Description: Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing From the bestselling author of A Mountain of Crumbs, a “brilliant and illuminating” (BookPage) portrait of mothers and daughters that reaches from Cold War Russia to modern-day New Jersey to show how the ties that hold you back can also teach you how to start over...read more

Product Description: The Promised Land (1912) edited here with illustrations from photographs, is the autobiography of Mary Antin, was an American author and immigration rights activist. It tells the story of her early life in what is now Belarus and her immigration to the United States in 1894...read more

Product Description: The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators--her father, Josef Stalin...read more

“Remarkable…told with wry humor shorn of sentimentality… In the end, what sticks with the reader is an exuberant immigrant embrace of America.” ―San Francisco ChronicleIn 1972, when she was seven, the author and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond Firoozeh’s father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. In a series of deftly drawn scenes, Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (or cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an array of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot. An unforgettable story of identity, discovery, and the power of family love, Funny in Farsi will leave us all laughing―without an accent.“What’s charming beyond the humor of this memoir is that it remains affectionate even in the weakest, most tenuous moments for the culture. It’s the brilliance of true sophistication at work.” ―Los Angeles Times Book Review“Often hilarious, always interesting… Like the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, this book describes with humor the intersection and overlapping of two cultures.” ―The Providence Journal

Product Description: Growing up in remote Cameroon, Richard Afuma could not expect to live much past the age of 40, and his chances of any sort of education were slim. But at the age of eight, Afuma found his way to a school run by Baptist missionaries...read more

Product Description: A classroom staple, Immigrant Voices: New Lives in America, 1773-2000 has been updated with writings that reflect trends in immigration to the United States through the turn of the twenty-first century. New chapters include a selection of letters from Irish immigrants fleeing the famine of the 1840s, writings from an immigrant who escaped the civil war in Liberia during the 1980s, and letters that crossed the U...read more

Product Description: In 1994, Anchee Min made her literary debut with a memoir of growing up in China during the violent trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Red Azalea became an international bestseller and propelled her career as a successful, critically acclaimed author...read more

Product Description: One of Maria Chaudhuri's early memories growing up in Dhaka was planning to run away with her friend Nadia. Home was not an especially unhappy place, but in Maria's family, joy was ephemeral. With a mother who yearned for the mountains and the solitariness and freedom to pursue her own dreams and career, and a charismatic but distant father who found it difficult to express emotion, they were never able to hold on to happiness for very long...read more

Product Description: For All of Us, One Today is a fluid, poetic story anchored by Richard Blanco’s experiences as the inaugural poet in 2013, and beyond. In this brief and evocative narrative, he shares for the first time his journey as a Latino immigrant and openly gay man discovering a new, emotional understanding of what it means to be an American...read more

Product Description: A memoir of coming of age and struggling to leave the USSR. Shrayer chronicles the triumphs and humiliations of a Soviet childhood and expresses the dreams and fears of a Jewish family that never gave up its hopes for a better life...read more

Product Description: From the author of Happy Birthday or Whatever, an outright hilarious and heartfelt collection of personal essays about everything from underwear to musical theater.ANNIE CHOI HATES MUSICAL THEATER. SHE THINKS SANDWICHES ARE BORING...read more

Product Description: In 1961, fearing the communist rule of Fidel Castro, Guillermo Vicente Vidal's family sent him to America through Operation Peter Pan. He arrived in Colorado and was sent to an orphanage with his brothers, and his family reunited four years later...read more

Product Description: On February 10, 1940, the Szelazek family was deported as prisoners of war from Poland to a Soviet labor camp in Siberia, beginning a 12-year epic journey that spanned countries and continents. In From Exile to Eden, Jadwiga Szelazek Morrison traces her family’s harrowing yet inspirational flight from war-torn Europe beginning with two remarkable people—Tadeusz Szelazek born in 1909 to a titled family of the old Polish aristocracy and Helena Semerylo born on Armistice Day 1918...read more