"Franz Kafka's diaries and letters suggest that his fascination with America grew out of a desire to break away from his native Prague, even if only in his imagination. Kafka died before he could finish what he liked to call his ''American novel, " but he clearly entitled it Der Verschollene ("The Missing Person") in a letter to his fiancee, Felice Bauer, in 1912. Kafka began writing the novel that fall and wrote the last completed chapter in 1914,...

In 1908, sixteen-year-old Bridey runs away from her small town in Ireland with her sweetheart Thom. But Thom dies of ship fever, leaving Bridey alone and pregnant in a strange new world. The Latecomers spans a century of American life and reminds us that we can never truly leave the past behind.

"From lonely immigrants struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school custodian who penned a New Yorker short story... Invisible People collects the best of Tizon's rich, empathetic accounts... Mining his Filipino American background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. He gives an account of the Beltway sniper and insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs."--Dust jacket flap.

Three generations of Palestinian-American women in contemporary Brooklyn are torn by individual desire, educational ambitions, a devastating tragedy and the strict mores of traditional Arab culture.

"Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother...

Illustrations and easy-to-read text tell of travelers who have left their homelands to bring their talents, hopes, and determination to a land where Liberty's light shines for all.

An immigrant youth struggling to assimilate, a middle-aged housewife with a troubled marriage, a Vegas social worker, and a wounded soldier connect with each other and rescue themselves in the wake of an unthinkable incident.

"When Carmen Vega's boyfriend tries to kill her, she hands over all her savings to a smuggler and sets out from Tijuana in a small, leaky boat. Within sight of the California coast, the boat starts to sink, and its passengers have to be rescued by border patrol. Soon, Carmen turns up dead in a privately-operated Migrant Detention Center. Neither Nick Finn, the officer who saved Carmen from drowning, or his wife, human-rights lawyer Mona Jimenez, are...

"On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind's arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother's ashes to China--to her,...