NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “An epic road trip [that also] captures the unruly intimacies of marriage and parenthood ... This is a novel that daylights our common humanity, and challenges us to reconcile our differences.” —The Washington Post In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way. A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

"Not just a gift. It's history in the making. Family history is important. Photos, videos, aged documents, and cherished papers--these are the memories that you want to save. And they need a better home than a cardboard box. Creating Family Archives is a book written by an archivist for you, your family, and friends, taking you step-by-step through the process of arranging and preserving your own family archives. It's the first book of its kind offered to the public by the Society of American Archivists. Gathering up the boxes of photos and years of video is a big job. But this fascinating and instructional book will make it easier and, in the end, much better"--

Despite the importance of archives to the profession of history, there is very little written about actual encounters with them—about the effect that the researcher’s race, gender, or class may have on her experience within them or about the impact that archival surveillance, architecture, or bureaucracy might have on the histories that are ultimately written. This provocative collection initiates a vital conversation about how archives around the world are constructed, policed, manipulated, and experienced. It challenges the claims to objectivity associated with the traditional archive by telling stories that illuminate its power to shape the narratives that are “found” there. Archive Stories brings together ethnographies of the archival world, most of which are written by historians. Some contributors recount their own experiences. One offers a moving reflection on how the relative wealth and prestige of Western researchers can gain them entry to collections such as Uzbekistan’s newly formed Central State Archive, which severely limits the access of Uzbek researchers. Others explore the genealogies of specific archives, from one of the most influential archival institutions in the modern West, the Archives nationales in Paris, to the significant archives of the Bakunin family in Russia, which were saved largely through the efforts of one family member. Still others explore the impact of current events on the analysis of particular archives. A contributor tells of researching the 1976 Soweto riots in the politically charged atmosphere of the early 1990s, just as apartheid in South Africa was coming to an end. A number of the essays question what counts as an archive—and what counts as history—as they consider oral histories, cyberspace, fiction, and plans for streets and buildings that were never built, for histories that never materialized. Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Marilyn Booth, Antoinette Burton, Ann Curthoys, Peter Fritzsche, Durba Ghosh, Laura Mayhall, Jennifer S. Milligan, Kathryn J. Oberdeck, Adele Perry, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, John Randolph, Craig Robertson, Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, Jeff Sahadeo, Reneé Sentilles

A wealth of previously unpublished letters and personal documents drawn from the family archives of the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

This is a rare and detailed account of what it meant to individual Africans to be turned almost overnight into colonial subjects in the nineteenth-century. The Lawson family of Aneho, a small town on the coast of Togo, possesses a letterbook of 718 documents in English, and this is the first attempt to publish such a source in its entirety. The correspondence dates mainly from the periods 1841-77 (relating to the transition from the Atlantic slave trade to 'legitimate trade', mainly in palm oil) and 1883-85 (a period dominated by the efforts of King G. A. Lawson III to prevent Aneho and its surroundings from becoming part of a French or German colony). The volume also contains documents from the early twentieth-century, including some illuminating pieces of local historiography. The documents are framed by a comprehensive editorial apparatus.