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Celebrating the American Experience Through Fiction |
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Big Chief
by Jon Hickey
Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. Alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe's Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack's reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack's estranged sister and Mitch's former love. In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go-and what they will sacrifice-to win it all. But when an accident claims the life of Mitch's mentor, a power broker in the reservation's political scene, the election slides into chaos and pits Mitch against the only family he has. As relationships strain to their breaking points and a peaceful protest threatens to become an all-consuming riot, Mitch and Layla must work together to stop the reservation's descent into violence. Thrilling and timely, Big Chief is an unforgettable story about the search for belonging-to an ancestral and spiritual home, to a family, and to a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.
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Lost Children Archive
by Valeria Luiselli
This novel tells the story of a family's summer road trip across America - a journey that, with profound humanity, probes the nature of justice and equality in America today. A mother and father set out with their kids from New York to Arizona. In their used Volvo - and with their ten-year-old son trying out his new Polaroid camera - the family is heading for the Apacheria: the region the Apaches once called home, and where the ghosts of Geronimo and Cochise might still linger. The father, a sound documentarist, hopes to gather an "inventory of echoes" from this historic, mythic place. The mother, a radio journalist, becomes consumed by the news she hears on the car radio, about the thousands of children trying to reach America but getting stranded at the southern border, held in detention centers, or being sent back to their homelands, to an unknown fate. As the family drives farther west - through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas - we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, unforgettable adventure - both in the harsh desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations. Told through the voices of the mother and her son, as well as through a stunning tapestry of collected texts and images - including prior stories of migration and displacement - this is a story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most.
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The Prophets
by Robert Jones
A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.
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The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong
"Brilliant, heartbreaking, tender, and highly original - poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a sweeping and shattering portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born--a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam--and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity"
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The House of Broken Angels
by Luis Alberto Urrea
In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies, transforming the weekend into a farewell doubleheader. Among the guests is Big Angel's half brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo, shared a life. Across two bittersweet days in their San Diego neighborhood, the revelers mingle among the palm trees and cacti, celebrating the lives of Big Angel and his mother, and recounting the many inspiring tales that have passed into family lore, the acts both ordinary and heroic that brought these citizens to a fraught and sublime country and allowed them to flourish in the land they have come to call home.
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The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
by Debra Magpie Earling
Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history.
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My Name Is Iris
by Brando Skyhorse
Newly divorced, Iris Prince moves to a new neighborhood where she, a proud second-generation Mexican American, is plunged into a climate of fear and hate-fueled violence after the launch of a mandatory identification wristband, forcing her to confront how far she'll go to protect what matters to her most.
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Harlem Rhapsody
by Victoria Christopher Murray
In 1919 Harlem, literary editor Jessie Redmon Fauset is at the forefront of a Black cultural renaissance, discovering talents like Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen, but her ambition and a secret affair with W.E.B. Du Bois threaten her legacy.
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Swamplandia!
by Karen Russell
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness.
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Lot
by Bryan Washington
Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot is about love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.
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History of Wolves
by Emily Fridlund
On the edge of a lonely lake in Midwest of America, an isolated teenage girl befriends a young woman and her child, who have moved into a nearby cabin. The child’s father is perpetually absent. When he returns home, Linda is suddenly shunned by the family unit. Desperate to be accepted again, she struggles to resume her place in their home and fails to see the terrible warning signals, with devastating consequences.
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The Little Friend
by Donna Tartt
In Alexandria, Mississippi, a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes is found dead in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s family remains devastated by his unsolved murder. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet - unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss.
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Native Speaker
by Chang-rae Lee
In Native Speaker, author Chang-rae Lee introduces readers to Henry Park. Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American—a native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage seems to drift further and further away.
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Inland
by Téa Obreht
Mythical, lyrical, and sweeping in scope, Inland is grounded in true but little-known history. It showcases all of Téa Obreht's talents as a writer, as she subverts and reimagines the myths of the American West, making them entirely--and unforgettably--her own.
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The Great Believers
by Rebecca Makkai
In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.
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Interior Chinatown
by Charles Yu
Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
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Sabrina & Corina
by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
A haunting debut story collection on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands, centered on Latinas of indigenous ancestry that shines a new light on the American West.
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The Rabbit Hutch
by Tess Gunty
An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents--neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana. Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives. Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.
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True Grit
by Charles Portis
In the 1870s, young Mattie Ross learns that her beloved father was gunned down by his former handyman. But even though this gutsy 14-year-old is seeking vengeance, she is smart enough to figure out she can't go alone after a desperado who's holed up in Indian territory. With some fast-talking, she convinces mean, one-eyed US Marshal "Rooster" Cogburn into going after the despicable outlaw with her.
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