Immigration
By Jon Went

Fiction

Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent (New York: Plume Books, 1992). Alvarez tells the story of immigrant women living in the Bronx who hail from the Dominican Republic.

Helen Barolini, Umbertina: A Novel (New York: Feminist Press, 1999). Through the lives of a grandmother, her daughter, and granddaughter, Barolini offers a panorama of Italian immigrant experience from an intergenerational perspective.

Thomas Bell, Out of this Furnace (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976). Bell forges an account of early twentieth-century Slovakian steel workers and labor with one family's intergenerational history in Pittsburgh.

Hjalmar Horth Boyesen, Falconberg (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899). The author depicts the realities of Norwegian immigrants trying to come to grips with the social pressures of American society.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain (New York: Penguin Books, 1995). Boyle's novel brings together wealthy suburbanites and illegal immigrants in Los Angeles, California, narrating their shared yet utterly divergent lives and the problems they face.

________. World's End (New York: Penguin Books, 1990). Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Book Award for fiction, Boyle offers a look at several generations of family life beginning with a Dutch settlement in late seventeenth-century New York.

Louis Chu, Eat a Bowl of Tea (New York: Citadel Press, 1986). Chu offers a satire of the Chinese bachelor society that developed in New York City during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Helen Campbell, Turnip Blues (Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press, 1999). Near life-long friends recall their youth as immigrants in America from the perspective of 75 years.

Willa Cather, My Antonia (New York: Penguin Classic, 1994). Weaving together the story of Antonia, a Bohemian immigrant and Jim, a transplanted Virginian, Cather illustrates the multicultural nature of Nebraska in the late-nineteenth century.

________. Oh! Pioneers (New York: Signet, 2004). In what many regard as Cather's masterpiece, this classic examines immigrant society in Nebraska during the settlement period.

Edwige Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Vintage, 1994). Danticat details a young Haitian girl's immigration from the rural island to New York City and her effort to come to grips with her identity.

Pietro Di Donato, Christ in Concrete (New York: Signet Books, 1993). Building the narrative of an Italian immigrant family around the central character Paul, Di Donato composed an expansive examination of early twentieth-century urban culture.

Jeffrey Eugenides, MiddleSex: A Novel (New York: Picador, 2002). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Eugenides' book details the history of a Greek family in Detroit as well skillfully interweaving the personal history of the main character Cal, a person of indeterminate gender.

James T. Farrell, James T. Farrell: Studs Lonigan, a Trilogy, Pete Hamill ed. (New York: Library of America, 2004). Farrell sets his trilogy in an Irish ethnic enclave in twentieth-century America and details the experiences of William "Studs" Lonigan, using the character to speak more broadly about the experiences of Irish Catholics in America.

Louis Forgione, In the River Between (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1928). Exploring a theme that is almost strikingly universal, Forgione wrote about the intergenerational rifts that emerged between first- and second-generation Italian immigrants in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2000). The editors of this anthology bring together poets that possess a sharp eye for social detail and provide the reader with windows of insight into the thoughts, experiences, and lives of immigrants.

Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (New York: Penguin, 1990). Hoffman offers a fascinating look at the meaning of language vis-à-vis individual identity while telling a Polish girl's story and her family's escape from the Holocaust and communist Russia to Vancouver, Canada.

Francisco Jimenez, The Circuit: Stories From the Life of A Migrant Child (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). In this eminently readable set of stories, Jimenez pens the humanistic angle of contemporary immigration through the eyes of a child.

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake: A Novel (New York: Mariner Books, 2004).Exploring the rending affects that too often typify inter-generational immigrant experiences, Lahiri explores an Indian-American family's transformation as they reconcile their past with the demands of the present.

__________. Interpreter of Maladies (New York: Mariner Books, 1999). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Lahiri’s short stories explore Indian assimilation in American culture.

Ludwig Lewisohn, The Island Within (Syracuse: University Press, 1997). Lewisohn chronicles three generations of a Jewish family beginning in the 1840s and ending with their immigration to the United States.

Bernard Malamud, The Assistant (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003). Set in post-WWII New York, Malamud tells the story of an Italian man and a Jewish family and their struggles to live within modern America.

Vilhem Moberg, The Emigrants (St. Paul: Borealis Books, 1996). Moberg tells the story of Swedish immigration to the United States in intricate detail.

Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories (Grove Press, 1999). Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, this book probes into the lives of a spectrum of immigrants, particularly women, in the late twentieth century.

John Okada, No-No Boy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978). Okada offers far-reaching insight and depth into the Japanese-American experience during WWII.

Ole Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (New York: Harper Collins First Perennial edition, 1999). The author immigrated from Norway in 1896, and in this book narrates the story of Norwegian settlers on the Dakota prairies during the 1870s.

________. Peder Victorious: A Tale of the Pioneers Twenty Years Later (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). Continuing the story of the Holm family from Giants in the Earth, Rolvaag chronicles the ongoing cultural struggles between Peder and his Norwegian heritage.

Agnes Rossi, The Houseguest (New York: Plume Books, 2000). This novel delves into the story of a disgruntled Irish soldier and his family as they leave for America in the 1930s and eventually settle in Patterson, New Jersey.

Victor E. Villasenor, Rain of Gold (New York: Delta Books, 1991). This intergenerational novel details one family's history along the US-Mexican border spanning the twentieth century.

Esmeralda Santiago, When I was Puerto Rican (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). Santiago takes the reader on a journey from a hovel in Puerto Rico to New York City, as a girl seeks to escape her immediate family life and poverty to live with her grandmother in the US.

Bapsi Sidhwa, An American Brat (Minneapolis: Milkweed editions, 1995). Sidhwa narrates the story of a Pakistani adolescent girl sent to live with her uncle, who is a professor at MIT, to escape the increasing religious fundamentalism of Pakistan society, and who eventually becomes enamored with all things American.

Maria Herrera-Sobek, Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). This lyrical book details Mexican immigration history from 1848 to 1991 through corridos, Mexican folk ballads.

Maxine Schwartz Seller, ed. Immigrant Women (Philadelphia, 1981). The editor has compiled a rich collection of stories and essays by and about immigrant women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Meredith Tax, Rivington Street (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). This novel tells the story of four immigrant Jewish women and their lives on the Lower East Side of New York City at the turn of the century.

Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party (New York: Schocken Books, 2002). This is a novella about the lives of Russian immigrants living in New York City, gathered to say goodbye forever at one man's passing.

Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (New York: Persea Books, 1999).The writer, a Polish immigrant and Jewish woman who published the book in 1925, takes readers inside a Jewish family living in urban America during the early decades of the twentieth century.