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THESE 3 NOVELS DETAIL THE PAIN OF SEPARATION FOR MIGRANT FAMILIES

Never before have so many people fled their homes. According to the United Nations, the number has reached 68.5 million, with only about 100,000 of them resettled. Millions have left behind war, violence, and famine only to face new challenges: children separated from their parents in the United States, extended stays in squalid camps in Greece, and migrant ships turned back by Italian officials. These three writers account for the difficult decisions and hard realities families face when they gamble everything they know to search for something better.

 

Inspired by the story of an undocumented Guatemalan woman whose 5-year-old son was adopted away from her by an American couple in Missouri, writer Shanthi Sekaran follows two immigrant mothers in her novel Lucky Boy. One crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without papers, the other followed her husband to Silicon Valley from India. Their stories cross around one “lucky boy.”

In Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, writer Laila Lalami follows four people who, like many thousands in recent years, risk their lives on a rubber dinghy on the Mediterranean in hopes of a new life in Europe. They each have their own reasons for craving an escape -- abusive marriages to demeaning work to troubled children -- and each are driven by hope for a life that will be better, just as soon as it isn’t so foreboding.

 

Writer Jenny Erpenbeck captures the diversity of migrants streaming into Germany in her Go, Went, Gone. The book follows a retired academic, Richard, who happens upon a group of migrants camping out in a park only to make their lives the focus of a new study that is as much about the individual men he encounters as it is about the treatment of the “other” in Western Europe. Erpenbeck makes clear in this work that resilience is no one’s first reason for living.

FOUR POEMS FOR YOUR POST-ELECTION FEELINGS

FOUR POEMS FOR YOUR POST-ELECTION FEELINGS

The election that declared Republican Donald Trump president-elect on Tuesday has been the most divisive in recent history. Here are four poems that cut across some of the main issues that have emerged in the face off between he and Democratic Candidate Hillary Clinton. 

5 NOVELS THAT SHOW WHY ATTACKS ON GAY CLUBS ARE SO DEVASTATING

5 NOVELS THAT SHOW WHY ATTACKS ON GAY CLUBS ARE SO DEVASTATING

The attack on the Orlando, Florida gay club Pulse was not just a violation of a safe space, but a desecration of a place of celebration for a community still engaged in very real battles against marginalization, discrimination, and all out violence. These five novels show the importance of such venues to the LGBT community and offer a glimpse of just what was lost along with 49 lives in the most deadly mass shooting in U.S. history.