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.

When a newly appointed first female Chief of MI6 disappears weeks after two possibly related cases, disgraced former MI6 officer Thomas Kell is offered a chance to redeem his career by conducting a discreet operation that uncovers a shocking conspiracy.

Lowentahal looks at the benefits and burdens of the past, how we study the past, and how we change it.

Considers the question: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? In Islam Is a Foreign Country, Zareena Grewal explores some of the most pressing debates about and among American Muslims: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? Who has the authority to speak for Islam and to lead the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? Do their ties to the larger Muslim world undermine their efforts to make Islam an American religion? Offering rich insights into these questions and more, Grewal follows the journeys of American Muslim youth who travel in global, underground Islamic networks. Devoutly religious and often politically disaffected, these young men and women are in search of a home for themselves and their tradition. Through their stories, Grewal captures the multiple directions of the global flows of people, practices, and ideas that connect U.S. mosques to the Muslim world. By examining the tension between American Muslims’ ambivalence toward the American mainstream and their desire to enter it, Grewal puts contemporary debates about Islam in the context of a long history of American racial and religious exclusions. Probing the competing obligations of American Muslims to the nation and to the umma (the global community of Muslim believers), Islam is a Foreign Country investigates the meaning of American citizenship and the place of Islam in a global age.

Ong Soon Keong explores the unique position of the treaty port Xiamen (Amoy) within the China-Southeast Asia migrant circuit and examines its role in the creation of Chinese diasporas. Coming Home to a Foreign Country addresses how migration affected those who moved out of China and later returned to participate in the city's economic revitalization, educational advancement, and urban reconstruction. Ong shows how the mobility of overseas Chinese allowed them to shape their personal and community identities for pragmatic and political gains. This resulted in migrants who returned with new money, knowledge, and visions acquired abroad, which changed the landscape of their homeland and the lives of those who stayed. Placing late Qing and Republican China in a transnational context, Coming Home to a Foreign Country explores the multilayered social and cultural interactions between China and Southeast Asia. Ong investigates the role of Xiamen in the creation of a China-Southeast Asia migrant circuit; the activities of aspiring and returned migrants in Xiamen; the accumulation and manipulation of multiple identities by Southeast Asian Chinese as political conditions changed; and the motivations behind the return of Southeast Asian Chinese and their continual involvement in mainland Chinese affairs. For Chinese migrants, Ong argues, the idea of "home" was something consciously constructed. Ong complicates familiar narratives of Chinese history to show how the emigration and return of overseas Chinese helped transform Xiamen from a marginal trading outpost at the edge of the Chinese empire to a modern, prosperous city and one of the most important migration hubs by the 1930s.

New Poetry

By intelligence officials for intelligent people