Born in 1897, Milly Bennett lived an extraordinary life that led from her native San Francisco, to Honolulu, to China for the revolution, to the Soviet Union on the eve of World War II, to the Spanish Civil War, and home again, a journey punctuated with many love affairs, triumphs, and disappointments. This memoir of Milly's early years through her extended stay in China, places the current political turmoil there into a broader historical perspective. Nominally an autobiography of a remar...

TWO WOMEN. ONE HISTORY. A SECRETS THAT CROSSES CENTURIES.** The USA Today Bestseller****The number one Kindle bestseller**‘A cleverly crafted novel and an enthralling story… A triumph.’ DINAH JEFFERIES, author of The Tuscan ContessaLove. Guilt. Heartbreak.1914: Russia is on the brink of collapse, and the Romanov family faces a terrifyingly uncertain future. Grand Duchess Tatiana has ...

An ambitious man and his adoring daughter are separated and estranged by an ocean and by the tides of history in this "marvelous" novel ( Los Angeles Times).For Anna Schoene, growing up in the magical world of Shanghai in the 1930s creates a special bond between her and her father. He is the son of missionaries, a smuggler, and a millionaire who leads a charmed but secretive life. When the family flees to Los Angeles in the face of the Japanese occupation, ...

"A rip-roaring bio" of the trailblazing New Yorker journalist that "explore[s] both the passion and dissatisfaction that fueled Hahn's wanderlust" ( Entertainment Weekly ).Emily Hahn first challenged traditional gender roles in 1922 when she enrolled in the University of Wisconsin's all-male College of Engineering, wearing trousers, smoking cigars, and adopting the nickname "Mickey." Her love of writing ...

An indispensable memoir by the author of Goodbye to Berlin , one of the most prominent writers of his generation.Originally published in 1976, Christopher and His Kind covers the most memorable ten years in the writer's life—from 1928, when Christopher Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. His friends and colleagues during thi...

They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the center of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history.Red Sister, Ching-ling, married the 'Father of China', Sun Yat-sen, and rose to be Mao's vice-chair.Little Sister, May-ling, became Madame Chiang Kai-shek, first lady of...

Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist AwardWinner of the American Library Association's Sophie Brody MedalFinalist for the National Jewish Book AwardA singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: Forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.Yevgeny Gelman...

An NPR Best Book of the Year: "The most honest, unflinching, cathartically biting novel I've read about the Chinese American experience." —Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Our Missing HeartsWinner, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award * Winner, Chautauqua Prize *Finalist, Dayton Literary Peace Prize * A New York Times Notable Book * A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the YearSly, funny, intelligent, and artfully stru...

Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao’s “volunteer” army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors.With Yuan as guide, we are ushered into the secret world behind the barbed...

Miljenko Jergovic’s remarkable début collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro – winner of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize – earned him wide acclaim throughout Europe. Croatian by birth, Jergovic ? spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war. A dazzling storyteller, he brings a profoundly human, razor-sharp understanding of the fate of the city’s young Muslims, Croats, and Serbs with a subterranean humor and profoundly personal vision. Their off...

This novel of an American musician caught up in the dangers of 1930s China is "historical fiction at its best" (Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things Considered).In 1936, classical pianist Thomas Greene is recruited to Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra of fellow African American expats. After being flat broke in segregated Baltimore, he is now living in a mansion with servants of his own, the toast of a city obsessed with music, money, pleasure, and power, even as...

Sergei Dovlatov's subtle, dark–edged humor and wry observations are in full force in The Suitcase as he examines eight objects—the items he brought with him in his luggage upon his emigration from the U.S.S.R. These seemingly undistinguished possessions, stuffed into a worn–out suitcase, take on a riotously funny life of their own as Dovlatov inventories the circumstances under which he acquired them, occasioning a brilliant series of interconnected tales: A poplin shirt evokes th...