The Day My Mother Cried And Other Stories

The lasting charm of Kaufman’s stories lies in a delightful mix of personal incidents and observations set against an anchoring backdrop of cultural tradition. His new collection is filled with tales from his parents’ homeland in the Ukraine, his own childhood reminiscences, and his adult travels. We watch the young author forced alongside “every Jewish boy on the block” to emulate Yehudi Menuhin on a ten-dollar violin with a moldy bow until the boy is spared by an innate lack of talent and his father’s judgment of his concert: “Enough is enough is more than enough.” Kaufman is carefully attuned to the awkwardness of adulthood as well as to that of early adolescence. In “Interlude in Bangkok,” his narrator scours the city for a synagogue while pursued by a prostitute. Later he and a friend encounter Greta Garbo in a museum café and are too frightened to approach her. Aware of their intrigue, the mysterious movie star intones, “I am not she”; Kaufman, in his own way, says that of himself in these stories through an autobiographical narrator whose memories take on resonant, literary shapes in their retelling.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself” (NPR). • CELEBRATING OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

Narrated in the tradition of Tolstoy's confessional trilogy and Nabokov's autobiog­raphy, Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story is a searing account of growing up a Jewish refusenik, of a young poet's rebellion against totalitarian culture, and of Soviet fantasies of the West during the Cold War. Shrayer's remembrances ore set against a rich backdrop of politics, travel, and ethnic conflict on the brink of the Soviet empire's collapse. His moving story offers generous doses of humor and tenderness, counterbalanced with longing and violence.

In March 2007, Leah Fishbane, a promising young graduate student in the prime of her life, was struck down suddenly with a undiagnosed brain tumor. In this deeply evocative memoir, written during the dark time of the first year following Leah’s death, her husband Eitan gives voice to the overwhelming power of grief and to the deep love that underlies such pain. He tells the story of his efforts to be a good father to his grieving four–year–old child and of his discovery of himself as a parent in ways he had not known before. Along this path, Fishbane asks fundamental questions about the meaning of death and life, about the place of God and faith in the experience of tragedy, reflecting on what it means to live with loss. The result is a poetic testament that will resonate with countless mourners and their loved ones. In giving honest expression to emotions that are at once particular and universal, Shadows in Winter offers a luminous window of comfort and hope to those battling the devastation of loss.

The Day They Took My Uncle and Other Stories is a collection of 15 shorts by novelist Lionel Garcia, dealing mostly with working-class and poor inhabitants of the southwestern U.S. Difficulties encountered by Latinos in America are a recurrent theme.

William Kaufman grew up on his mother’s kugel and his father’s boyhood stories. The son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and the Ukraine and one of five children, he learned how to translate his colorful childhood into tales of his own, regaling audiences of family, friends, and eventually his retirement community with periodic public readings. Now, at the age of 93, Kaufman makes his stories, filled with a sharp wit and telling detail, available to a wider audience for the first time. In the title story a young Jewish boy is shamed by his narrow-minded teacher when she forces him to admit, before the whole class, that his mother cannot read English. His mother’s eventual encounter with the teacher offers a lesson in self-respect with just the right balance of grace and moxie. In “The Search for God in the A & P” a young boy goes on a clandestine mission to compare prices at his father’s grocery competition; the expedition meets with comic results when the young boy refuses to be bullied in this David-and-Goliath-style parable. These semi-autobiographical stories, populated with outsized and magnetic characters, subtly layer the specifics of the Jewish experience with universals dilemmas of childhood, growing up, and old age.

Call it a collection of stories or a compilation of human emotions, this is the second solo book of Ms Rimli Bhattacharya. The author calls herself a bohemian and travels around the globe in a caravan which is driven by rape, lust, lies, forbidden love, mental illness, homicide and death. This book had been crafted sitting in that caravan lost in myriad textures and flavours, with those mental demons screaming her to stop. She did not listen. The book which unleashes the dark domain of human mind makes it a compelling read.