Uyen Nicole Duong’s Daughters of the River Huong takes readers on a century-long journey into the extraordinary history of Vietnam, all seen through the eyes of Simone, a precocious and passionate teenager who reveals the lives of her Vietnamese ancestors. Beginning with Huyen Phi, the Mystique Concubine from the extinct Kingdom of Champa, to her daughters, Madame Cinnamon and Ginseng, and finally to Simone’s own mother, Duong gives listeners a compelling, historic, and sometimes voyeuristic view into a world few have experienced.

Anju and Sudha formed an astounding, almost psychic connection during their childhood in India. When Anju invites Sudha, a single mother in Calcutta, to come live with her and her husband, Sunil, in California, Sudha foolishly accepts, knowing full well that Sunil has long desired her. As Sunil's attraction rises to the surface, the trio must struggle to make sense of the freedoms of America - and of the ties that bind them to India and to one another.

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

Khaled Hosseini, the number-one New York Times best-selling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations.

As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read. Yet in spite of her repressive upbringing, Deborah grew into an independent-minded young woman whose stolen moments reading about the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott helped her to imagine an alternative way of life among the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.

These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.

Chizuru Akitani is the 12-year-old daughter of the famous violinist and Japanese "Living National Treasure" Hiro Akitani. Overweight and hafu (her mother is white), she is tormented by her classmates and targeted by the most relentless bully of them all, Tomoya Yu. When Chizuru's mother dies suddenly, her father offers her no comfort and she is left feeling alone and unmoored. At school, her bully's cruelty intensifies, and in a moment of blind rage, Chizuru grabs a Morimoto letter opener from her teacher's desk and fatally stabs Tomoya Yu in the neck.

Kwaku Sai is dead. A renowned surgeon and failed husband, he succumbs suddenly at dawn outside the home he shares in Ghana with his second wife. The news of Kwaku's death sends a ripple around the world, bringing together the family he abandoned years before. Ghana Must Go is their story. Electric, exhilarating, beautifully crafted, Ghana Must Go follows the Sais' journey, moving with great elegance through time and place to share the truths hidden and lies told; the crimes committed in the name of love.

With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will.

"The Great Failure is a boundless embrace, leaving nothing out. I wanted to learn the truth, to become whole. If I could touch the dark nature in someone else, I could know it in myself." So begins Natalie Goldberg in this candid exploration of her life. Here, Goldberg makes sense of primary relationships between father and daughter, teacher and student, and exemplifies the accomplishment available when creating daily writing practices.

The daughter of a poor baker in rural Bengal, India, Sabitri yearns to get an education, but her family's situation means college is an impossible dream. Then an influential woman from Kolkata takes Sabitri under her wing, but her generosity soon proves dangerous after the girl makes a single unforgivable misstep. Years later, Sabitri's own daughter, Bela, haunted by her mother's choices, flees abroad with her political refugee lover - but the America she finds is vastly different from the country she'd imagined.

Best-selling author Gary Shteyngart’s exquisite fiction is met with a level of critical acclaim reserved for the very best in the field. In this startlingly provocative work, Russian immigrant Vladimir Girshkin searches for love and self-identity while interacting with a quirky set of acquaintances.

From the universally acclaimed author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!, a brilliant, deeply moving work of fiction that explores the world of a "dew breaker", a torturer, a man whose brutal crimes in the country of his birth lie hidden beneath his new American reality.

Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. One night Rasa's grandmother - the woman who raised him - catches them in bed together. The following day Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend, Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar Guapa, who has been arrested by the police.

Anju and Sudha formed an astounding, almost psychic connection during their childhood in India. When Anju invites Sudha, a single mother in Calcutta, to come live with her and her husband, Sunil, in California, Sudha foolishly accepts, knowing full well that Sunil has long desired her. As Sunil's attraction rises to the surface, the trio must struggle to make sense of the freedoms of America - and of the ties that bind them to India and to one another.

Winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry and an American Book Award for her short stories, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explores themes of women, immigration, and her vibrant Indian culture to great effect. Divakaruni expands on these ideas in One Amazing Thing, a project long in the making and full of electric prose.

These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.

Told through the eyes of the Leongs' secret-keeping daughters and wives and spanning the Boxer Rebellion to Pearl Harbor to 1960s Hawaii, Diamond Head is a breathtakingly powerful tale of tragic love, shocking lies, poignant compromise, aching loss, heroic acts of sacrifice, and miraculous hope.

"The Great Failure is a boundless embrace, leaving nothing out. I wanted to learn the truth, to become whole. If I could touch the dark nature in someone else, I could know it in myself." So begins Natalie Goldberg in this candid exploration of her life. Here, Goldberg makes sense of primary relationships between father and daughter, teacher and student, and exemplifies the accomplishment available when creating daily writing practices.

Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. One night Rasa's grandmother - the woman who raised him - catches them in bed together. The following day Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend, Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar Guapa, who has been arrested by the police.

For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers - French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly - exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand", their relationship grew tense.

Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.

Debut novelist Shilpi Somaya Gowda pens this compelling tale about two families, worlds apart, linked by one Indian child. After giving birth to a girl for a second time, impoverished Kavita must give her up to an orphanage. The baby, named Asha, is adopted by an American doctor and raised in California. But once grown, Asha decides to return to India.

On any particular day, thousands upon thousands of people pass through New York City's Grand Central Terminal, through the whispering gallery, beneath the ceiling of stars, and past the information booth and its beckoning four-faced clock, to whatever destination is calling them. It is a place where people come to say hello and good-bye. And each person has a story to tell.

Max doesn't remember his mother, who was murdered by burglars before they emigrated from Beirut to New Jersey. He lives with his father, Rasheed, who is enamored of his concept of American culture - baseball and barbeques - and tries to shed his Lebanese heritage completely.

An honor killing shatters and transforms the lives of Turkish immigrants in 1970s London. Internationally best-selling Turkish author Elif Shafak’s new novel is a dramatic tale of families, love, and misunderstandings that follows the destinies of twin sisters born in a Kurdish village. While Jamila stays to become a midwife, Pembe follows her Turkish husband, Adem, to London, where they hope to make new lives for themselves and their children. In London, they face a choice: stay loyal to the old traditions or try their best to fit in.

Set across Istanbul and Oxford, from the 1980s to the present day, Three Daughters of Eve is a sweeping tale of faith and friendship, tradition and modernity, love and an unexpected betrayal. Peri, a wealthy Turkish housewife and mother, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground - an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor.

The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.