FP Staff Picks: Books Across Borders
The new anthology GO HOME! showcases the writing of twenty-four individuals who explore the singular intimacies of figuring out what it means to belong. This forthcoming collection inspired the FP staff to generate a list of our favorite titles about the immigrant/migrant experience, from The Buddha of Suburbia to The Diary of a Young Girl: Anne Frank.
You can grab your own copy of GO HOME! edited by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and published in collaboration with the Asian American Writers' Workshop on March 13 or you can preorder now. While you wait, tell us your favorite titles to read/recommend when they yell "Go home!" Tweet @FeministPress with #GoHome.
Drew: The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri (Alfred A Knopf)
Crossing oceans and cultures from Calcutta to America, this is a dazzling tale of two brothers bound by tragedy, a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past, a country torn apart by revolution, and a love that lasts long past death.
Sophia: A Stranger In Olondria
by Sofia Samatar (Small Beer Press)
This novel musters all the imaginative force of the fantasy genre to explore migration (geographic and cultural) under the sway of empire. It's a beautifully written speculation on how different cultures encounter, absorb, and clash with one another.
Tenny: The Line Becomes a River
by Francisco Cantú (Riverhead Books)
As an offspring of immigrant parents, Cantú provides a dual perspective of the United States/Mexico border dispute and leaves no truth uncharted in his memoir about the border wars affecting immigrants.
Jisu: Boy Genius
by Yongsoo Park (Akashic Books)
I'm ashamed to admit that before reading Boy Genius, I had internalized the idea that Asian American books were all sober tales of intergenerational conflict, dealing with first generation parents as a second generation child. But Boy Genius completely shattered that idea—this is a hilarious, surreal, coming-of-age odyssey. It's a book that refuses to compromise its identity, but also helps itself to the messy richness of twentieth-century cultural history.
Neeti: The Buddha of Suburbia
by Hanif Kureishi (Faber and Faber)
A coming-of-age novel set in 1970s suburban London, The Buddha of Suburbia follows teenager Karim as he explores his sexuality, navigates class relations in the Thatcher era and finds his place in the underground punk music scene.
Jamia: The Diary of a Young Girl: Anne Frank
by Anne Frank (Random House)
Anne Frank, the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants to the Netherlands, chronicles her experience hiding in her "Secret Annex" while living in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
Lucia: In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson
by Bette Bao Lord (HarperCollins)
A hilarious and timeless story about an immigrant girl inspired by the sport she loves to find her own team, and break down any barriers that stand in her way.
Maya: The Lonely Londoners
by Samuel Selvon (St. Martin's Press)
This book follows the lives of several young men from the West Indies, namely Moses Aloetta, as they navigate 1950s Britain. It's a book about the alienation and loneliness that can come with immigration, but it's also about old communities in new lands, comradery and the power of laughter.
Amna: Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi (Penguin Random House)
Spanning seven generations and three continents, Homegoing follows the lives of two sisters, Effia and Esi, and how their different destinies affect their descendants.
Hannah: I, The Divine
by Rabih Alameddine (W. W. Norton & Company)
I, the Divine is a fragmented story of Sarah Nour El-Din, a woman seeking to create space for herself amongst conflict: civil war, family upheaval, divorce, and infidelity. The novel is told entirely through Sarah's attempts at a first chapter of an autobiographical novel/memoir. Each chapter reveals a different vignette —some delivered drunk, entirely in French, or scrapped mid-sentence—that come together to shape a portrait of her life between the United States and Lebanon.
Suki: Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides (Picador)
A richly detailed story that follows the life of an intersex man and three generations of his Greek-American family.
Lauren:Though I Get Home
by YZ Chin (Feminist Press)
Interlinked stories trace postcolonial memory and political dissidence across the globe.
Alyea: Breath, Eyes, Memory
by Edwidge Danticat (Soho Press)
At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti—to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence.
Don't forget to buy GO HOME! at your local bookshop on March 13, or preorder now:
Edited by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
"Go home!" is always a slur, but often also an impossibility; this collection explores the words' personal and political dimensions.
Also available from the Feminist Press:
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands
Paule Marshall
A vivid and bittersweet classic coming-of-age tale, set in immigrant Brooklyn.
Michael Wilson and Deborah S. Rosenfelt
The controversial 1954 screenplay about a strike in a New Mexico zinc mine.