American Literature

Southern China, 1923. Desperate to secure her future, Mei Ling’s parents arrange a marriage to a widower in California. To enter the country, she must pretend to be her husband’s first wife - a paper wife. On the perilous voyage, Mei Ling takes an orphan girl named Siew under her wing. Dreams of a better life in America give Mei Ling the strength to endure the treacherous journey and detainment on Angel Island. But when she finally reaches San Francisco, she’s met with a surprise. Her husband, Chinn Kai Li, is a houseboy, not the successful merchant he led her to believe.

When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details. One, that his childhood home looks like a palace; two, that he grew up riding in more private planes than cars; and three, that he just happens to be the country’s most eligible bachelor.

You just can't plan for this kind of thing. Diane Tate certainly hasn't. She never expected to slowly lose her talented husband to the debilitating effects of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. As a respected family court judge, she's spent her life making tough calls, but when her 68-year-old husband's health worsens and Diane is forced to move him into an assisted living facility, it seems her world is spinning out of control. As Gregory's memory wavers and fades, Diane and her children must reexamine their connection to the man he once was - and learn to love the man he has become.

Evan MacIan is a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed Scottish Highlander and a devout Roman Catholic. James Turnbull is a short, red-haired, gray-eyed Lowlander and a devout but naïve atheist. The two meet when MacIan smashes the window of the street office where Turnbull publishes an atheist journal. This act of rage occurs when MacIan sees posted on the shop's window a sheet that blasphemes the Virgin Mary, presumably implying she was an adulteress who gave birth to an illegitimate Jesus.

Mackenzie, a Cree millennial, wakes up in her one-bedroom Vancouver apartment clutching a pine bough she had been holding in her dream just moments earlier. When she blinks, it disappears. But she can still smell the sharp pine scent in the air, the nearest pine tree a thousand kilometers away in the far reaches of Treaty 8. Mackenzie continues to accidentally bring back items from her dreams, dreams that are eerily similar to real memories of her older sister and Kokum before their untimely deaths.

From New York Times best-selling author Stephen Graham Jones comes a novel that is equal parts psychological horror and cutting social commentary on identity politics and the American-Indian experience. Fans of Jordan Peele and Tommy Orange will love this story as it follows the lives of four American-Indian men and their families, all haunted by a disturbing, deadly event that took place in their youth. Years later, they find themselves tracked by an entity bent on revenge, totally helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a vengeful way.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned - from the layout of the winding roads to the colors of the houses to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren - an enigmatic artist and single mother - who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter, Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons.

Award-winning novelist Tayari Jones delivers a story based on the 1979-1980 Atlanta child murders. Told from the perspective of three fifth-grade classmates, Leaving Atlanta is a vividly disturbing, but hopeful novel.

Culture and Anarchy is a series of periodical essays by Matthew Arnold, first published in Cornhill Magazine 1867-68 and collected as a book in 1869. Arnold's famous piece of writing on culture established his High Victorian cultural agenda which remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until the 1950s. According to his view advanced in the book, ‘Culture [...] is a study of perfection’.

When Lily's blind dog, Lucky, slips his collar and runs away across the wide-open blueberry barrens of Eastern Maine, it's Salma Santiago who manages to catch him. Salma, the daughter of migrant workers, is in the small town with her family for the blueberry-picking season.

Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple. For the most part, these differences are minor irritants, arguments between parents and children, older and younger siblings. But one night, the twelve-year-old son is arrested.

Thirty-two-year-old Denise Jackson has everything a woman could ask for: a lovely home in the posh Dallas suburbs, a fancy car, a loving husband, and a beautiful nine-year-old daughter, Deandra. While seemingly having it all, Denise still feels incomplete. Her nine years of marriage to Jeff have been nothing more for her than a marriage of convenience to raise Deandra in a stable two-parent home. She pretends to be happily married, but allows her husband and best friend to carry on an affair, giving Denise time to get better acquainted with her multimillionaire client, Greg Adams.

La primera novela para adultos en casi 15 años de la autora internacionalmente superventas de "In the Time of the Butterflies" y "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents". Antonia Vega, la escritora inmigrante en el centro de "Afterlife", ha sacado la alfombra de debajo de ella. Acaba de retirarse de la universidad donde enseñó inglés cuando su amado esposo, Sam, muere repentinamente.

India, 1986: Mukta, a 10-year-old village girl from the lower-caste Yellama cult, has come of age and must fulfill her destiny of becoming a temple prostitute, as her mother and grandmother did before her. In an attempt to escape her fate, Mukta is sent to be a house girl for an upper-middle class family in Mumbai. There she discovers a friend in the daughter of the family, high-spirited eight-year-old Tara, who helps her recover from the wounds of her past.

Weaving a vibrant tapestry of fact and fiction, Into the Wilderness sweeps us into another time and place...and into the heart of a forbidden, incandescent affair between a spinster Englishwoman and an American frontiersman. Here is an epic of romance and history that will captivate readers from the start.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729. Swift suggests in his essay that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling children as food. By doing this he mocks the authority of the British officials.

1932: Located on the banks of the Gilead River in Minnesota, Lincoln School is home to hundreds of Native American boys and girls who have been separated from their families. The only two white boys in the school are orphan brothers Odie and Albert, who, under the watchful eyes of the cruel superintendent Mrs. Brickman, are often in trouble for misdeeds both real and imagined. The two boys' best friend is Mose, a mute Native American who is also the strongest kid in school. And they find another ally in Cora Frost, a widowed teacher who is raising her little girl, Emmy, by herself.

In 1948 most White people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the 10 million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous White journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a Black man in the Jim Crow South. Escorted through the South's parallel Black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic Black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local Black leaders, and families of lynching victims.

For Unique, life is good until her dope-dealing boyfriend, Took, is arrested and winds up in jail. Now she's broke as a joke, trying to put every petty hustle into play to chase hard times away from the door. With an empty refrigerator, a stack of bills piling up, a tenth-grade education, a big butt and a smile, it doesn't take long for her to learn to pull the wool over the eyes of any fool who's blinded by her good looks.

Helen wasn't just born the devious vixen of New Day Temple of Faith. There had to be something rooted deep within her to make her inflict and feed off other people's pain. Perhaps it was her own pain that she had suppressed for so many years - an unimaginable pain - that created an internal prison of which her mind was the only captive. But once the demons within her break free, those around her better beware, as Helen surely becomes the epitome of the saying, "Hurt people, hurt people".