Subject: Fiction

Allrightniks Row: “Haunch Paunch and Jowl”
Allrightniks Row book cover, historic street illustration
Ornitz, Samuel (introduction by Gabriel Miller)

Subject: World Literature, US History, World History

This turn-of-the-century novel portrays people born in the tenements around Hester Street who fight their way out of the slums to make it to the fashionable Allrightniks Row. Its colorful characters include the narrator of the story, a corrupt judge …

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Cuentos: Stories from Puerto Rico (Bilingual)
Book cover: Stories from Puerto Rico collection
Wagenheim, Kal, editor

Subject: Caribbean

Cuentos is a bilingual anthology of twelve short stories, many of which appeared in the 1960s in the English-language magazine The San Juan Review, co-founded by Kal Wagenheim and Augusto Font. Written by six of Puerto Rico’s leading writers, the …

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Family Chronicle: An Odyssey from Russia to America
Book cover: Charles Reznikoff Family Chronicle
Reznikoff, Charles

Subject: Europe, U.S. History

This remarkably moving and often funny saga becomes the collective memoir of the celebrated American poet and his family. Drawing upon the childhood stories of his parents, the author weaves together narratives that portray life in 19th-century provincial Russia, capture …

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Passage from Home: The Erotic Awakening of a Young Intellectual
Passage From Home cover with vintage family photo
Rosenfeld, Isaac (edited by Jonathan D. Sarna; introduction by Mark Shechner)

Subject: World Literature

This outstanding family novel, set in a Jewish neighborhood of Chicago, is “the fullest articulation of the generational conflict between Jewish fathers and [sins],” writes Alexander Bloom in his 1986 book Prodigal Sons. The central character, a 15-year-old boy in …

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Pathetic Symphony: A Biographical Novel About Tchaikovsky
Blue book cover with seated older man
Mann, Klaus

Subject: World Literature

Like Mephisto, Pathetic Symphony is a novel about important artists and their milieu. Drawing his material from documented sources, and without ever distorting historical truth or sacrificing biographical accuracy for the sake of the narrative, Klaus Mann here presents a …

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