The Face

The Face

Author: Tash Aw

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-03

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 1632060450

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A whirlwind personal history of modern Asia, as told through his Malaysian and Chinese heritage


Relative Strangers

Relative Strangers

Author: Allie Cresswell

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2012-06-26

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 9781477400715

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The McKay family gathers for a week-long holiday at a rambling old house to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Robert and Mary. In recent years only funerals and sudden, severe illnesses have been able to draw them together and as they gather in the splendid rooms of Hunting Manor, their differences are soon uncomfortably apparent. For all their history, their traditions, the connective strands of DNA, they are relative strangers. There are truths unspoken, but the question is: how much truth can a family really stand? The family holiday mushrooms, drawing in sundry relatives both estranged and deranged. The machinations of an appalling, uninvited aunt threaten the holiday - and the family - with irreparable damage. This book will make you question your own family situation. What does it really mean to be 'family'?


Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

Author: Camille T. Dungy

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2017-06-13

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 0393253767

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Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Colorado Book Award As a working mother and poet-lecturer, Camille Dungy’s livelihood depended on travel. She crisscrossed America and beyond with her daughter in tow, history shadowing their steps, always intensely aware of how they were perceived, not just as mother and child but as black women. From the San Francisco of settlers’ dreams to the slave-trading ports of Ghana, from snow-white Maine to a festive yet threatening bonfire in the Virginia pinewoods, Dungy finds fear and trauma but also mercy, kindness, and community. Penetrating and generous, this is an essential guide for a troubled land.


Relative Strangers

Relative Strangers

Author: Paula Garner

Publisher: Candlewick Press

Published: 2018-04-10

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 0763699616

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Why is there a gap in Jules’s baby album? A wry and poignant coming-of-age novel about finding the truth in lies, salvaging hope in heartbreak, and making peace with missing pieces. Eighteen-year-old Jules has always wished for a close-knit family. She never knew her father, and her ex-addict mother has always seemed more interested in artistic endeavors than in bonding with her only daughter. Jules’s life and future look as flat and unchanging as her small Illinois town. Then a simple quest to find a baby picture for the senior yearbook leads to an earth-shattering discovery: for most of the first two years of her life, Jules lived in foster care. Reeling from feelings of betrayal and with only the flimsiest of clues, Jules sets out to learn the truth about her past. What she finds is a wonderful family who loved her as their own and hoped to adopt her — including a now-adult foster brother who is overjoyed to see his sister again. But as her feelings for him spiral into a devastating, catastrophic crush — and the divide between Jules and her mother widens — Jules finds herself on the brink of losing everything.


Family of Strangers

Family of Strangers

Author: Howard Droker

Publisher:

Published: 2022-04-26

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 9780578306070

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From early immigrants to recent transplants, Jews in Washington have made notable contributions to civic and cultural life in their local communities, state, nation, and world. Family of Strangers, published originally in 2003, draws on hundreds of newspaper articles, oral histories, and one-on-one interviews to provide the first comprehensive account of Jewish communities and people in Washington state. This second edition of Family of Strangers features a new epilogue that explores Jewish history in Washington state over the past several decades - an era characterized by growth, diversity, and geographic spread.


Relative Strangers

Relative Strangers

Author: Frank Cicero

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Published: 2011-06-28

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 089733731X

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An Italian American investigates his family’s mixed religious roots in northern Italy and Sicily in this fascinating memoir. Italian Protestants? Few people seem to have heard of them, but the author’s mother’s immigrant Italian family was Protestant while his father’s were Catholic immigrants from Sicily. On his father’s side, with dozens of aunts, uncles and numerous cousins, Catholic family gatherings were loud, often profane, with drinking, smoking and raucous celebrations of weddings, births, holidays, and other occasions as well as the mystical rituals inherent in the Catholic faith. By contrast, on his mother’s side, family gatherings were small and quiet, with no smoking or drinking; and religion was the core of most family celebrations. But the author had little understanding of the ancient origins of his maternal grandparents’ very different Protestant faith which marked the keen differences between the two sides of the family. Relative Strangers describes the author’s search for the religious roots of his parents’ families in northern Italy and Sicily. He traces the history of the Waldensians, the Protestant sect which began in Lyon, France, in the twelfth century, often suffering persecution, but surviving to this day both in Europe and America.


Strangers and Cousins

Strangers and Cousins

Author: Leah Hager Cohen

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2019-05-14

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0698409647

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ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR One of Christian Science Monitor's BEST FICTION OF 2019 "Funny and tender but also provocative and wise. . . One of the most hopeful and insightful novels I've read in years." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post "Serious yet joyous comedy, reminiscent of the Pultizer-winning Less" - Out Magazine A novel about what happens when an already sprawling family hosts an even larger and more chaotic wedding: an entertaining story about family, culture, memory, and community. In the seemingly idyllic town of Rundle Junction, Bennie and Walter are preparing to host the wedding of their eldest daughter Clem. A marriage ceremony at their beloved, rambling home should be the happiest of occasions, but Walter and Bennie have a secret. A new community has moved to Rundle Junction, threatening the social order and forcing Bennie and Walter to confront uncomfortable truths about the lengths they would go to to maintain harmony. Meanwhile, Aunt Glad, the oldest member of the family, arrives for the wedding plagued by long-buried memories of a scarring event that occurred when she was a girl in Rundle Junction. As she uncovers details about her role in this event, the family begins to realize that Clem's wedding may not be exactly what it seemed. Clever, passionate, artistic Clem has her own agenda. What she doesn't know is that by the end, everyone will have roles to play in this richly imagined ceremony of familial connection-a brood of quirky relatives, effervescent college friends, ghosts emerging from the past, a determined little mouse, and even the very group of new neighbors whose presence has shaken Rundle Junction to its core. With Strangers and Cousins, Leah Hager Cohen delivers a story of pageantry and performance, hopefulness and growth, and introduces a winsome, unforgettable cast of characters whose lives are forever changed by events that unfold and reverberate across generations.


Random Families

Random Families

Author: Rosanna Hertz

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2018-11-16

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 019088827X

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"The ready availability of donated sperm and eggs has made possible an entirely new form of family. Children of the same donor and their families, with the help of the internet, can now locate each other and make contact. Sometimes this network of families form meaningful connections that blossom into longstanding groups, and close friendships. This book is about unprecedented families that have grown up at the intersection of new reproductive technologies, social media and the human desire for belonging. Random Families asks: Do shared genes make you a family? What do couples do when they discover that their children shares half their DNA with a dozen or more other offspring from the same sperm donor? What do kids find in common with their donor siblings? What becomes of these chance networks once parents and donor siblings find one another? Based on over 350 interviews with children (ages 10-28) and their parents from all over the U.S., Random Families chronicles the chain of choices that couples and single mothers make from what donor to use to how to participate (or not) in donor sibling networks. Children reveal their understanding of a donor, the donor's spot on the family tree and the meaning of their donor siblings. Through rich first-person accounts of network membership, the book illustrates how these extraordinary relationships -- woven from bits of online information and shared genetic ties -- are transformed into new possibilities for kinship. Random Families offers down-to-earth stories from real families to highlight just how truly distinctive these contemporary new forms of family are." -- Publisher's description


Relative Strangers

Relative Strangers

Author: Margaret Hermes

Publisher: Blair

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 9780932112620

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Fourteen short stories by St. Louis author Margaret Hermes. Winner of the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, selected by Jill McCorkle.


In the Company of Strangers

In the Company of Strangers

Author: Barry McCrea

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0231157630

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This title shows how a reconception of family and kinship underlies the revolutionary experiments of the modernist novel. While stories of marriage and long-lost relatives were a mainstay of classic Victorian fiction, the book suggests that rival countercurrents within these family plots set the stage for the formal innovations of Joyce and Proust. By investigating how the question of family is a hidden key to modernist structure and style, the book explores the formal narrative potential of queerness and in doing so rewrites the history of the modern novel.