An Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Honor Book Meet Danbi, the new girl at school! Danbi is thrilled to start her new school in America. But a bit nervous too, for when she walks into the classroom, everything goes quiet. Everyone stares. Danbi wants to join in the dances and the games, but she doesn't know the rules and just can't get anything right. Luckily, she isn't one to give up. With a spark of imagination, she makes up a new game and leads her classmates on a parade to remember! Danbi Leads the School Parade introduces readers to an irresistible new character. In this first story, she learns to navigate her two cultures and realizes that when you open your world to others, their world opens up to you.

Walt Disney World is often called the happiest place on earth. Families visit to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, homecomings from war, victory over cancer, and mainly, together time. Visitors to the Magic Kingdom line Main Street and Liberty Square every afternoon to watch as Mickey and his pals fill the streets in a whimsical parade as a lucky family (or families) gets to lead it all. For fourteen years, Dean Gaschler had the privilege of choosing those families and often became friends with them. These are the stories of just a few of those families. Stories of hope, loss, love, and family that will warm your heart."

Leading the Parade traces the evolution of the gay and lesbian liberation through the personal profiles and stories of nearly 40 individuals whose daring efforts changed gay and straight America and their attitudes toward homosexuality during the twentieth century.

The debut novel from award-winning author Lori Ostlund—“smart, resonant, and imbued with beauty” (Publishers Weekly) that “provides considerable pleasure and emotional power” (The New York Times Book Review)—about a man who leaves his longtime partner in New Mexico for a tragicomic road trip deep into the mysteries of his own Midwestern childhood. Sensitive, bighearted, and achingly self-conscious, forty-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confinements of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. After twenty years under the Pygmalion-like care of his older partner, Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to take control of his own fate. But soon after establishing himself in San Francisco, Aaron sees that real freedom will not come until he has made peace with his memories of Mortonville, Minnesota—a cramped town whose four hundred souls form a constellation of Aaron’s childhood heartbreaks and hopes. After Aaron’s father died in the town parade, it was the larger-than life misfits of his childhood who helped Aaron find his place in a world hostile to difference. But Aaron’s sense of rejection runs deep: when Aaron was seventeen, Dolores—his loving yet selfish and enigmatic mother—vanished one night. And when, all these years later, a new friend in San Francisco offers Aaron a way to locate his mother, his past and present collide, forcing Aaron to rethink his place in the world. “Touching and often hilarious...Ostlund writes with acuity and refreshing honesty about the messy complexity of being a social animal in today’s world...” (Booklist, starred review). “Everything here aches, from the lucid prose to the sensitively treated characters to their beautiful and heartbreaking stories...An example of realism in its most potent iteration: not a nearly arranged plot orchestrated by an authorial god but an authentic, empathetic representation of life as it truly is” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). After the Parade is a glorious anthem for the outsider.

From the bestselling author of The Circle comes a taut, suspenseful story of two foreigners' role in a nation's fragile peace. With echoes of J. M. Coetzee and Graham Greene, this "darkly funny" novel (The Los Angeles Times) questions whether we can ever understand another nation's war, and what role we have in forging anyone's peace. An unnamed country is leaving the darkness of a decade at war, and to commemorate the armistice the government commissions a new road connecting two halves of the state. Two men, foreign contractors from the same company, are sent to finish the highway. While one is flighty and adventurous, wanting to experience the nightlife and people, the other wants only to do the work and go home. But both men must eventually face the absurdities of their positions, and the dire consequences of their presence.

"Let's have a parade" is the phrase that begins a beloved American tradition, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 1924, employees of the R. H. Macy and Company store in Herald Square, many of whom were immigrants and first-generation Americans, chose to give thanks for their good fortune in a manner reminiscent of the festive parades held in their native countries. The excitement and praise from crowds lining the route that first year led Macy's to issue an immediate proclamation: the parade would become a tradition. Before the parade's first decade passed, Macy's welcomed the huge and spectacular helium character balloons that became its goodwill ambassadors. Since then, the parade has become a world-famous treasure. Through rare and historic images, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade offers readers a chance to reminisce, explore, and delight in eighty years of this thoroughly American celebration.