In The Story of Your Obstinate Survival, Daniel Khalastchi boldly strides across a landscape of smoldering fires, unmarked boxes, and pictures of senators in airplane bathrooms as a way of asking: In the face of incessant turmoil, how do we go on? This exhilarating and innovative book collapses genre and upends narrative convention with dazzling ......
Ronya Othmann's debut novel narrates the coming of age of Leyla, a Yazidi-Kurdish-German girl. She spends the school year in her mother's home country of Germany but travels every summer to her father's home village in Syria, near the Turkish border. She knows its smells and tastes. She knows its stories. She knows where the Yazidi villagers keep ......
Alex Ross, a thirty-year-old psychologist, enjoys the benefits of a close-knit family: her mother and aunt are twins married to two close friends, and Alex and her cousins, Rolf and Stephen, grew up as if they were siblings. When Rolf is killed in a car accident, Alex's entire family spins into grief and chaos. Nathaniel, a mysterious art ......
The Thief of Words is filled with desperate runaways, the unhappily married, and the displaced. They often long for happiness but struggle to explain-even to themselves-what that would entail. The lightly interconnected stories in this riveting collection are split between the Polish American communities of northern Wisconsin and Louisiana, ......
Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste
"What might it mean to take the dead seriously?" asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who ......
The Catholic Church and Homosexuality in the Twentieth Century
As gay men and lesbian women increasingly gained recognition and acceptance in twentieth-century literature and film, and subsequently in social and political movements, the Catholic Church reacted by subtly moving away from its overt condemnation of homosexuality as an urgent moral problem and toward tacitly shunning homosexuality as an ......
Since the collapse of socialism, Bulgaria's population has been on the move-out of rural regions and into cities, or out of the country altogether. Yet today there is a countermovement of young, urban Bulgarians, born after 1989, seeking to repopulate rural villages and reclaim traditional Bulgarian folklife. Though many of these young Bulgarians ......
Through family interviews, original photographs, and national records, Beatrice Loftus McKenzie traces the many lives of a resilient multigenerational family whose experiences parallel the complicated relationship between America and China in the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, Charles Wong moved from Guangdong Province to the United States ......
Labor and Creativity in Germany's Long Nineteenth Century
In The Work of Music, Celia Applegate examines the cultural history of Austro-German music through the lens of labor from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia to the Third Reich. She explores the working world of music and musicians, the various jobs they performed, the work music did in society, the observations and commentaries of contemporaries on the ......
