Visiting Your Ancestral Town encourages you to walk in the footsteps of your ancestors while gaining a deeper understanding of your family roots, and experiencing the places where your family once lived. This comprehensive second edition is part genealogy tutorial and part vacation guide book. It includes comprehensive recommendations for researching your family history, including tips on locating that hard-to-find ancestral town. This is your essential guide for getting the most out of a trip seeking your family roots.

“Extraordinary and wide-ranging . . . a literary feat that simultaneously builds and excavates identity.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize • An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her complicated Southern family—and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves—in this “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” (The Boston Globe). ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Esquire, Garden & Gun Maud Newton’s ancestors have fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father was said to have married thirteen times. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Newton’s family inspired in her a desire to understand family patterns: what we are destined to replicate and what we can leave behind. She set out to research her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and other harms. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them. Searching and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to make peace with the secrets and contradictions of her family's past and face its reverberations in the present, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.

A how-to guide for researching your ancestors, discovering your ancestral towns, and planning a meaningful trip to explore your ancestral homeland.

NOTHING TRAVELS FASTER THAN MSK10A IN THE UNIVERSE. STOPPING IN SPACE FOR REPAIR IS NOT AN OPTION. THE TIME IT TAKES TO SEARCH FOR A PERFECT PLANET IS UNKNOWABLE. Halik’s dream of visiting Earth comes true through an opportunity to save Mars and its people from the danger of collision with Earth or its moon. He and his team take a long, arduous journey from Sulok of the Triangulum galaxy to Earth to save Mars. Half of a problem is said to be solved if you know the root cause of the problem. Halik’s team works hard to find the cause of the danger to Mars. Does the team find it? Saving a planet from such danger is not an easy but a mammoth task. The team believes that nothing is impossible for humans. But does the team succeed in saving Mars? The icing on the cake would be the restoration of uninhabitable Earth. Does the team transform the planet into an inhabitable Earth?

From rediscovering an ancestral village in China to experiencing the realities of American life as a Nigerian, the search for belonging crosses borders and generations. Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, the essays in A Map Is Only One Story highlight the human side of immigration policies and polarized rhetoric, as twenty writers share provocative personal stories of existing between languages and cultures. Victoria Blanco relates how those with family in both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez experience life on the border. Nina Li Coomes recalls the heroines of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and what they taught her about her bicultural identity. Nur Nasreen Ibrahim details her grandfather’s crossing of the India-Pakistan border sixty years after Partition. Krystal A. Sital writes of how undocumented status in the United States can impact love and relationships. Porochista Khakpour describes the challenges in writing (and rewriting) Iranian America. Through the power of personal narratives, as told by both emerging and established writers, A Map Is Only One Story offers a new definition of home in the twenty-first century.