Leaving the Country of Sin is a tale of Rafferty, who was saved as a teenager from a promising career of juvenile delinquency and slapped into a six-year hitch in the army to avoid jail time. Early on his anger and fierce resolve catch the attention of an officer in charge of a small cadre of soldiers who provide unique, subdued solutions to problems that are too sensitive for more obvious snipers or commandos. But it is also the story of the inner reckoning the central character faces once his army career is complete. Rafferty, having long determined to retire on Galveston Island, which he had visited as a child with his uncle, hovers between seeing his past deeds as providing a patriotic service and just another form of murder. The dilemma is intensified when his old mentor, the general who pulled him into that world and managed him for two decades, shows up with an assignment that will rid the world of a very evil man, whose actions threaten the security of the nation. Thus the story, already an inward journey motif, becomes a real one, sending Rafferty off on what he determines is his last mission, one he wishes hadn't fallen to him.

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD “Nothing short of magic.” —Elizabeth Acevedo, New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X From the acclaimed poet featured on Forbes Africa’s “30 Under 30” list, this powerful novel-in-verse captures one girl, caught between cultures, on an unexpected journey to face the ephemeral girl she might have been. Woven through with moments of lyrical beauty, this is a tender meditation on family, belonging, and home. my mother meant to name me for her favorite flower its sweetness garlands made for pretty girls i imagine her yasmeen bright & alive & i ache to have been born her instead Nima wishes she were someone else. She doesn’t feel understood by her mother, who grew up in a different land. She doesn’t feel accepted in her suburban town; yet somehow, she isn't different enough to belong elsewhere. Her best friend, Haitham, is the only person with whom she can truly be herself. Until she can't, and suddenly her only refuge is gone. As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life not chosen—the name her parents meant to give her at birth—Yasmeen. But that other name, that other girl, might be more real than Nima knows. And the life Nima wishes were someone else's. . . is one she will need to fight for with a fierceness she never knew she possessed.

Today more than ever, large numbers of Americans are leaving the United States. It is estimated that by the end of the decade, some 10 million of the brightest and most talented Americans, representing an estimated $136 billion in wages, will be living and working overseas. This emigration trend contradicts the internalized myth of America as the land of affluence, opportunity, and freedom. What is behind this trend? Wennersten argues that many people these days, from college students to retirees, are uncertain or ambivalent about what it means to be an American. For example, many are uncomfortable with that they believe America has come to represent to the rest of the world. At the same time, globalization and advances in technology have enabled the growth of a telecommuting work force whose members can live in one country and work in another, and this trend, among other factors, has encouraged a new generation of people to respond to the pull of global citizenship. Leaving America is an important reexamination of one of the most central stories in the history of American culture—the story of the immigrant coming to the Promised Land. While millions still come to America and millions more still wish to do so, there is an important counterflow of emigration from America to distant parts of the planet. This book focuses on modern American expatriates as a significant and heretofore largely ignored counterpoint phenomenon every bit as central to understanding modern America as is the image of a nation of immigrants. The greatest irony in America today may well be that while argument and discord prevail in the edifice of American democracy about diversity, economic justice, equality, and the Iraq War, many of the most thoughtful citizens have already left the building.

Leaving the Country of Sin is a tale of Rafferty, who was saved as a teenager from a promising career of juvenile delinquency and slapped into a six-year hitch in the army to avoid jail time. Early on his anger and fierce resolve catch the attention of an officer in charge of a small cadre of soldiers who provide unique, subdued solutions to problems that are too sensitive for more obvious snipers or commandos. But it is also the story of the inner reckoning the central character faces once his army career is complete. Rafferty, having long determined to retire on Galveston Island, which he had visited as a child with his uncle, hovers between seeing his past deeds as providing a patriotic service and just another form of murder. The dilemma is intensified when his old mentor, the general who pulled him into that world and managed him for two decades, shows up with an assignment that will rid the world of a very evil man, whose actions threaten the security of the nation. Thus the story, already an inward journey motif, becomes a real one, sending Rafferty off on what he determines is his last mission, one he wishes hadn’t fallen to him. The Sabine Series in Literature

Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive "A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country's violent role in the world." —Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book Review In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul. Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country—and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, “a broken heart . . . A one-hundred-year-old relationship.” Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on America’s place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation—a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.

The author recalls her early years in a small Jewish town in western Russia and the last days there as she and her mother prepare to join her father in the United States.