The Immigrant Experience
Many Americans today grew up listening to stories from their parents or grandparents about what it was like to encounter a new country, new culture and new language. The books on this list give a first hand look at the immigrant experience.
FICTION |
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Arabian Jazz In this impressive, entertaining novel, a small, poor white community in upstate New York becomes home to the transplanted Jordanian family of Matussem Ramoud and his grown daughters. |
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How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Julia Alvarez's brilliant first book of fiction sets the Garcia girls free to tell their irrepressibly intimate stories about how they came to be at home -- and not at home -- in America. |
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The Saint of Lost Things: A Novel Maddalena has lost her country, her family, and the man she loved by coming to America; her husband has lost his opportunity to realize the American Dream; their new friend, Guilio, has lost his parents. In the shadow of St. Anthony's Church, the prayers of these troubled but determined people are heard. |
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My Antonia Widely recognized as Willa Cather's greatest novel, My Antonia is a soulful and rich portrait of a pioneer woman's simple yet heroic life. The spirited daughter of Bohemian immigrants, Antonia must adapt to a hard existence on the desolate prairies of the Midwest. |
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The House on Mango Street Sometimes heartbreaking, this book tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong--not to her rundown neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza's story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become. |
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Let It Rain Coffee Esperanza did not risk her life fleeing the Dominican Republic to live in a tenement in Washington Heights. No, she left for the glittering dream she saw on television. Years later, she is still stuck in a cramped apartment with family. When her husband’s father, Don Chan, comes to Nueva York to live in the Colóns' small apartment, nothing will ever be the same. |
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The Village Bride of Beverly Hills After an arranged marriage in her native India, Priya moves with her husband to California, where they share a house with his parents. Playing the traditional daughter-in-law role, she's expected to clean, cook, and-because she doesn't immediately get pregnant-find a job! But the job Priya lands isn't at all what her in-laws had in mind for a traditional Indian wife. She soon finds herself with a secret life that she must hide from her disapproving new family. |
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Drown With ten stories that move from the barrios of the Dominican Republic to the struggling urban communities of New Jersey, Diaz evokes a world in which fathers are gone, mothers fight with grim determination for their families, and the next generation inherits the casual cruelty and knowing humor of lives circumscribed by poverty and uncertainty. |
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House of Sand and Fog Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now a struggling immigrant willing to bet everything he has to restore his family's dignity. Kathy Nicolo is a troubled young woman whose house is all she has left, and who refuses to let her hard-won stability slip away from her. Drawn by their competing desires to the same small house in the California hills and doomed by their tragic inability to understand one another, the two converge in an explosive collision course. |
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Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to be American A moving collection of fiction featuring some of the nation's brightest voices on the complex and profound subject of race and ethnicity in America. |
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Snow in August Set in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood in 1947, this poignant tale revolves around eleven-year-old Irish Catholic boy Michael Devlin and Rabbi Judah Hirsch, a refugee from Prague. For Michael, the rabbi's stories of ancient magic and wisdom captivate his imagination. For the rabbi, Michael's patient instruction on the language of baseball and American culture opens up an equally strange and magical world. |
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Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land |
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You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free |
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The Namesake |
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China Boy: A Novel A young, American-born child of an aristocratic Mandarin family that has fled China struggles to assimilate in 1950s San Francisco in a novel from "an incredibly rich and new voice." |
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Brown Girl, Brownstones This beloved coming-of-age story set in Brooklyn during the Depression and World War II follows the life of Selina Boyce, a daughter of Barbadians immigrants. Her mother craves the American Dream while her father longs for his island birthplace. |
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Desirable Daughters: A Novel In Desirable Daughters, Mukherjee has written a novel that is both the portrait of a traditional Brahmin family on the brink of its dissolution, and a contemporary American story of a woman who has outwardly broken with tradition, but still remains tied to her native country. |
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The Rug Merchant: A Novel Isolated and far from his native Iran, Ushman Khan has worked hard to build a wealthy, reliable business selling exquisite hand-woven rugs. But like many immigrants, he’s living only half a life. He dreams of the day his wife will be able to join him and complete his vision of the American dream. But Ushman is shattered when she leaves him. Unexpectedly, he meets Stella, a college student and they embark on an improbable romance. |
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We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? Achy Obejas writes stories about uprooted people. Some, like her, are Latino immigrants and lesbians; others are people with AIDS, addicts, people living marginally, just surviving. As omniscient narrator to her characters lives, Obejas generously delves into her own memories of exile and alienation to tell stories about people who struggle for wholeness and love. |
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The Russian Debutante's Handbook Follow the adventures of Vladimir, a young Russian immigrant, whose capitalist dreams and desires for a girlfriend lead him off the straight and narrow and into uncharted territory. Taking us from the dreary confines of New York’s Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society to the hip frontier wilderness of Prava, The Russian Debutante's Handbook is both a madcap adventure and a serious look at what it means to be an outsider in America, and what it means to be American. |
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The Joy Luck Club In 1949 four Chinese women-drawn together by the shadow of their past-begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club. Forty years later, one of the members has died, and her daughter has come to take her place, only to learn of her mother's lifelong wish and the tragic way in which it has come true. |
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The Indian Lawyer His shiny Saab and his finely tailored suits make Sylvester Yellow Calf's childhood unimaginable. Abandoned by his parents, he was raised in poverty on the Blackfoot reservation in Montana. Now a prominent lawyer, Sylvester moves between two worlds, feeling slightly out of place in each. The Indian Lawyer is a vivid evocation of the American West and a provocative tale of the paradoxes of assimilation. |
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Up from Orchard Street This exhilarating novel centered on a memorable immigrant family brings to vibrant life the soul and spirit of New York’s legendary Lower East Side. Three generations of Roth’s live together in a crowded tenement flat. Widowed Manya is the family’s head and its heart. She’s renowned throughout the neighborhood for her cooking. But Manya is no soft touch–except, perhaps, where her adored granddaughter Elka is concerned. Through Elka’s eyes we come to know the fascinating characters that come in and out of the Roths’ lives. In this riveting story lies the heart of the American immigrant experience. |
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Bread Givers: A Novel This masterwork of American immigrant literature is set in the 1920s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, who rebels against her father's rigid conception of Jewish womanhood. |
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NONFICTION |
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American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood |
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The Dream: A Memoir During the hard years of his youth in England, Harry Bernstein’s selfless mother struggles to keep her six children fed. But she never stops dreaming of a better life in America. A new life full of promise seems possible thanks to an anonymous benefactor–and the family sets sail for America. For a time, the family gets a taste of the good life. But soon the harsh realities of the Great Depression envelop them. |
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Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America |
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I Begin My Life All Over : The Hmong and the American Immigrant Experience I Begin My Life All Over records the story of thirty-six Hmong immigrants to California, tracing their journey from the subsistence farms of Laos, through their harrowing escape into the camps of Thailand, and to relocation to a new continent, and to a new century. |
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Were You Always an Italian? Journalist Maria Laurino blends autobiography and cultural history in this revealing look at Italian culture and its impact on Italian-American, and American, life. Particularly valuable is her discussion of stereotyping and her insightful description of her struggle, beginning in adolescence, with her own Italian identity. |
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Paper Daughter: A Memoir A heartfelt and poignant memoir about the quintessential struggle to fit in -- told with wit and triumph through the eyes of a poor Chinese immigrant girl who exists in two worlds, belongs to neither, and struggle desperately to reconcile her place in both. |
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Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures Twelve essays by a Japanese-American writer about being caught between past and present, old country and new. |
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Out of Place: A Memoir Said writes with great wit about his early life in the Middle East and the US in the 1930s, sharing his journey from Cairo to boarding school in New England and college at Princeton. He tells of his lifelong process of coming to terms with the dissonance of being an American citizen, a Christian, and a Palestinian. |
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When I was Puerto Rican Magic, sexual tension, high comedy, and intense drama move through an enchanted yet harsh autobiography, in the story of a young girl who leaves rural Puerto Rico for New York's tenements and a chance for success. |