Ever since I was a kid, as the grandson of Italian immigrant farmers and the son of a Polish-immigrant father, I wondered how my family fit into the American story. As I grew older, I learned that the American story could not be limited to a single race, a single religion, or even a single generation. Rather, the essence of any culture lies in the story that gets passed down from one generation to the next. That is where my passion lies: tapping into the essence of multiple cultures by tracing the multigenerational family wisdom that is often imparted quietly, humbly, and painfully, which makes it durable, meaningful, and indelible.
I wrote
Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century
The gold standard of family sagas. A treasure trove of oral history, indomitable spirit, narrative genius, and breathtaking empathy even for those who might not deserve it. A spellbinding combination of scenery, history, dialogue, emotion, and suspense.
The chapter about the ocean crossing aboard the slave ship shook me physically yet held me firmly in place, for I knew I might never experience literature as muscular as this again.
Now a major BBC drama starring Forest Whitaker, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Laurence Fishburne
Tracing his ancestry through six generations - slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects - back to Africa, Alex Haley discovered a sixteen-year-old youth, Kunta Kinte. It was this young man, who had been torn from his homeland and in torment and anguish brought to the slave markets of the New World, who held the key to Haley's deep and distant past.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
An outpouring of kindness for families despite their flaws—or because of their flaws.
I miss the Hamiltons and Trasks because of the forgiving portrayal of their human limitations. One tragedy involving a brother and sister left a lasting impression on me precisely because of its gentle, restrained depiction, as if the tragedy were being viewed from the seat of heaven, with an infinite and eternal compassion.
California's fertile Salinas Valley is home to two families whose destinies are fruitfully, and fatally, intertwined. Over the generations, between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of the First World War, the Trasks and the Hamiltons will helplessly replay the fall of Adam and Eve and the murderous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
East of Eden was considered by Steinbeck to be his magnum opus, and its epic scope and memorable characters, exploring universal themes of love and identity, ensure it remains one of America's most enduring novels. This edition features a stunning new cover by renowned…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
The literary equivalent of smoking peyote: intuitive, enchanting, dreamlike, revelatory, with everything larger than life. An exploration of people’s hearts, souls, and sins. That is, their solitudes.
The family tree at the front was a lifesaver for me because of the recurrent names used across the generations. But the patterns across time are important thematically, just as patterns of color are required for explosive kaleidoscopic visions.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
A tapestry of eight points of view, threading together the stories of three generations of women across two continents. Taps into universal themes through intimate and candid conversations between Chinese-American mothers and their daughters.
Through their interwoven accounts, we find that history comes alive most vividly, most memorably, and most poignantly in family relationships that transcend time, place, and life experience.
'The Joy Luck Club is an ambitious saga that's impossible to read without wanting to call your Mum' Stylist
Discover Amy Tan's moving and poignant tale of immigrant Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters.
In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club.
Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives - until their own inner…
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse…
A chronicle of four generations of women descended from Louisiana slaves. Grapples honestly with the turmoil within America’s Black community over issues of skin color.
This saga shows that while families can be longtime sources of anguish in our communities, they can also be long-term resources—and as I have experienced, sometimes the best and most sustainable resources—for challenging common assumptions about one another and growing beyond them.
A New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick-the unique and deeply moving saga of four generations of African-American women whose journey from slavery to freedom begins on a Creole plantation in Louisiana.
Beginning with her great-great-great-great grandmother, a slave owned by a Creole family, Lalita Tademy chronicles four generations of strong, determined black women as they battle injustice to unite their family and forge success on their own terms. They are women whose lives begin in slavery, who weather the Civil War, and who grapple with contradictions of emancipation, Jim Crow, and the pre-Civil Rights South. As she…
An extended Italian immigrant family clings to community life amid tragedy, the Spanish flu, Prohibition, and the Great Depression. A broken Polish immigrant family leaves a legacy of heartbreak, separation, Civilian Conservation Corps redemption, and World War II heroism. From these dissimilar backgrounds emerges a quintessential American family, one whose members embody the conflicting social movements of their times: a staunchly Catholic Polish immigrant U.S. Marine Corps father, an emotionally effusive Italian mother, an Oliver North son, a Hillary Clinton daughter, a mentally ill sister, a jock brother, a lesbian rocker, and a gay male activist. In an age of bitter cultural polarization, Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century celebrates what has kept America together.
Secrets, lies, and second chances are served up beneath the stars in this moving novel by the bestselling author of This Is Not How It Ends. Think White Lotus meets Virgin River set at a picturesque mountain inn.
Seven days in summer. Eight lives forever changed. The stage is…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
