"Inhabiting four lives--a railroad baron's valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption--this novel captures over a century of our history through the immigrant family experience"--

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity from "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." (The New York Times)

Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they...

In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz analyses how [the] choice between assimilation or annihilation has played out in the lives of working-class musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers -- including Amy Winehouse, Ian Curtis, Jason Molina, Barbara Loden, and many more -- and the melancholia that ensues when the working-class subject leaves their origins to "become someone," only to find that they lose themselves in the process.

Three children from other countries (Somalia, Guatemala, and Korea) struggle to adjust to their new home and school in the United States.

"Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being...

Walk in the shoes of three elementary-school-aged immigrants as they learn how to balance becoming American with being Guatemalan, Korean, and Somalian as well!