A brilliantly crafted picaresque novel, sensual, harrowing and even comic, of an Asian-American woman's exile

These vivid oral histories of the lives of three remarkable political activists document a century of social change movements. Florence Luscomb campaigned for suffrage early in the century. Ella Baker was a civil rights organiser for over 50 years. Jessie Lopez De La Cruz, a lifelong farm worker, was the first woman to organise in the fields for the United Farm workers.

Three sisters return to their southern hometown after the death of their difficult, demanding mother, in a novel by the author of Baby of the Family. In life, Esther Lovejoy was an intolerable mother. She raised her daughters with an iron fist, browbeat her husband into submission, and insisted they call her Mudear (an abbreviation of Mother Dear). As adults with successful careers, Betty, Emily, and Annie Ruth have scattered across the country to avoid Mudear’s influence. But now it’s time to lay her to rest, and the Lovejoy sisters have returned to Mulberry, Georgia, to pay their last respects. What they discover is that while Mudear may be dead, she is far from gone. With a large dose of compassion and a generous splash of humor, Tina McElroy Ansa serves up a powerful tale of family secrets and the ways our scars make us stronger. “A voice that is fresh and strong and just quirky enough to stand out from the crowd.” —The Boston Sunday Globe “An entertaining read . . . The author, like a good small-town gossip . . . paints a vivid picture of three bright, beautiful and emotionally scarred African-American sisters.” —Los Angeles Times

In Diasporic Representations, author Pin-chia Feng examines the stratification of various diasporic subjectivities through close reading fiction by Chinese American women writers of different social and class backgrounds. Deploying a strategy of "attentive reading", Feng engages the intersecting issues of historicity, spatiality, and bodily imagination from diasporic and feminist perspectives to illuminate the dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in Chinese American novels in this transnational age. The authors studied include Diana Chang, Edith Eaton, Yan Geling, Nieh Hualing, Gish Jen, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Aimee Liu, Fae Myenne Ng, Sigrid Nunez, Han Suyin, and Amy Tan.

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.

Country Wisdom & Know-How is the most complete volume on every aspect of country and self-sustained living, from home and garden to barn and beyond. From Storey Publishing's landmark series Country Wisdom Bulletins, this comprehensive collection offers step-by-step instructions on nearly 200 individual topics, providing everything you need to know about sustainability, self-sufficiency, homesteading, and DIY living. Topics include: Animals: attracting backyard birds; building bathhouses and birdfeeders; training and caring for cats and dogs; raising rabbits, ducks, and game birds; buying and selling horses; building chicken coops; beginning beekeeping; Cooking: the basics of bread baking; making cheese, butter, and yogurt; cooking game; preserving and pickling; homebrewing and making homemade wine Crafts: stenciling, quilting, and basket-weaving; making wreaths, potpourri, and natural soaps; homemade gifts and decorations Gardening: starting your garden; caring for flowers and shrubs; controlling weeds; landscaping; growing vegetables, root crops, fruits, berries, kitchen herbs, and more Health and Wellbeing: natural home remedies; herbs for lifelong health; essential oils and aromatherapy; teas and recipes for a healthy diet Home: simple home repairs; building furniture; restoring hardwood floors; making curtains; building fences, root cellars, and smokehouses And so much more! With nearly 2,000 black-and-white illustrations, diagrams, and photographs, and trusted advice on every page, this is the most thorough and reliable volume of its kind. This book is also a part of the Know-How series which includes other titles such as: Woodworking Wisdom & Know-How Natural Healing Wisdom & Know-How Craft Wisdom & Know-How Garden Wisdom & Know-How

DIVA critical examination of what constitutes the varied positions grouped together as Asian American, seen in relation to both American and transnational forces./div

In Double Agency, Tina Chen proposes impersonation as a paradigm for teasing out the performative dimensions of Asian American literature and culture. Asian American acts of impersonation, she argues, foreground the limits of subjectivity even as they insist on the undeniable importance of subjecthood. By decoupling imposture from impersonation, Chen shows how Asian American performances have often been misinterpreted, read as acts of betrayal rather than multiple allegiance. A central paradox informing the book—impersonation as a performance of divided allegiance that simultaneously pays homage to and challenges authenticity and authority—thus becomes a site for reconsidering the implications of Asian Americans as double agents. In exploring the possibilities that impersonation affords for refusing the binary logics of loyalty/disloyalty, real/fake, and Asian/American, Double Agency attends to the possibilities of reading such acts as "im-personations"—dynamic performances, and a performance dynamics—through which Asian Americans constitute themselves as speaking and acting subjects.

A fictionalized account of the author's experiences growing up in a small village in rural China during the Cultural Revolution.

In Chinese Mythology, Anne Birrell provides English translations of some 300 representative myth narratives selected from over 100 classical texts, many of which have never before been translated into any Western language. Organizing the narratives according to themes and motifs common to world mythology, Birrell addresses issues of source, dating, attribution, textural variants, multiforms, and context. Drawing on exhaustive work in comparative mythology, she surveys the development of Chinese myth studies, summarizes the contribution of Chinese and Japanese scholars to the study of Chinese myth since the 1920s, and examines special aspects of traditional approaches to Chinese myth. The result is an unprecedented guide to the study of Chinese myth for specialists and nonspecialists alike.