Interviews, excerpts from diaries and letters, newspaper accounts, profiles of famous individuals, and pictures from family albums portray the heartache and joy of the Chinese American experience.

Against all odds-a new language, new customs, and prejudice-Italian Americans built a new life in Lamerica, the land of success. The Italian American Family Album brings us to the heart of the immigrant experience through diaries, letters, interviews, newspaper articles, and fascinating period photographs.

The American Family Album series tells the often heroic stories of American immigrant groups, largely through their own words and pictures. Like any family album, the pages contain period photographs, memorabilia, selections from diaries, letters, memoirs, and newspapers. Each book is a pictorial and written record of the country left behind, the journey to America, and the group's contributions to the United States. 149 illustrations.

"A superlative, riveting history" (BookPage) of Mary Shelley's creation of Frankenstein and the personal and poetic background behind the story. One murky night in 1816, on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron, famed English poet, challenged his friends to a contest--to write a ghost story. The assembled group included the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; his lover (and future wife) Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; Mary's stepsister Claire Claremont; and Byron's physician, John William Polidori. The famous result was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a work that has retained its hold on the popular imagination for almost two centuries. Less well-known was the curious Polidori's contribution: the first vampire novel. And the evening begat a curse, too: Within a few years of Frankenstein's publication, nearly all of those involved met untimely deaths. Drawing upon letters, rarely tapped archives, and their own magisterial rereading of Frankenstein itself, Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler have crafted a rip-roaring tale of obsession and creation.

Turn the pages of your family scrapbook or picture album and faces and memories leap out at you. Even if you never knew or don't remember some of your relatives, the snapshots and keepsakes make them familiar, and the old family stories never fail to bring a laugh and a warm memory. Now turn through the albums of other families--many other families--and see their grandfathers' and great-grandmothers' faces and read their stories. Why did they leave the old country? How did they get to America? What did they do when they got here? Why did they live the way they did? What did they think of the new homeland? What did other people think about them? How did they get along? The family album holds some of the answers. The American Family Albums tell the multicolored and often heroic stories of American immigrant groups, largely through their own words and pictures. Like any family album or scrapbook, the pages contain many period photographs and other memorabilia. These join with original documents--including selections from diaries, letters, memoirs, and newspapers--to bring the immigrant experience vividly to life. Each book is a pictorial and written record of the "old country" left behind, the journey to America, the life that the newcomers made for themselves in their adopted country, and the group's contributions to the brilliant diversity of these United States.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Asian American Studies. Native American Studies. INTIMATE is a hybrid memoir and "photo album" that blends personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry to examine the tense relationship between self, society, and familial legacy in contemporary America. Typographically innovative, INTIMATE creates parallel streams, narrating the stories of Rekdal's Norwegian-American father and his mixed-race marriage, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Curtis's murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. The result is panoramic, a completely original literary encounter with intimacy, identity, family relations, and race.