Books

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research mixed with archival work, Immigrants, Brokers, and Literacy as Affinity explores literacy’s entanglement in networks of economic and political forces. Mihut proposes and theorizes the figure of the literacy broker, embodied by those who help immigrants with reading and writing as they ...

This extraordinary work of oral history captures the immense drama and full dimensions of the American immigrant experience. The men and women who tell their stories include such famous names as Alistair Cooke, W. Michael Blumenthal, Edward Teller, and Lynn Redgrave. But they share these pages with 136 other people whose ...

Out of This Furnace is Thomas Bell’s most compelling achievement. Its story of three generations of an immigrant Slovak family — the Dobrejcaks — still stands as a fresh and extraordinary accomplishment. The novel begins in the mid-1880s with the naive blundering career of Djuro Kracha. It tracks his ...