Recipient of the 2020 Shelf Unbound Notable Indie Award A collection of essays by novelist J.F. Riordan, Reflections on a Life in Exile is easy to pick up, and hard to put down. By turns deeply spiritual and gently comic, these brief meditations range from the inconveniences of modern life to the shifting nature of grief. Whether it's an unexpected revelation from a trip to the hardware store, a casual encounter with a tow-truck driver, the changing seasons, or a conversation with a store clerk grieving for a dog, J. F. Riordan captures and magnifies the passing beauty of the ordinary and the extraordinary that lingers near the surface of daily life.

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss. As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own. Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.

"In this moving memoir, Dekow Diriye Sagar shares his story of growing up in a rural village in Southern Somalia, his terrifying escape of the civil war in the 1990s, and his life in the United States after being resettled. Sagar's story begins in his home village near Bardere, in 1991, at the age of seven years old. In one horrific day, the family lost their home and many loved ones, and began the arduous 15-year journey that ultimately brought him to the United States as a refugee. The war in Somalia claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, forced millions of citizens to seek safety and security in refugee camps and to flee into exile. Along the excruciating path to safety and freedom, shelter was a hot cloth tent with no electricity or running water. Life in Exile is a must-read for professionals in areas of healthcare, human services, education, and research. The book is ideal for those pursuing careers in political science, social work, health, education, leadership, and management, as well as for service providers in refugee and immigrant programs. Sagar's journey will deepen your understanding of a refugee's challenges and equip professionals to better serve this population."--Taken from back cover.

My Exile Lifestyle is a memoir made of stories from the life of author, entrepreneur, and full-time traveler, Colin Wright. From his early years as an antisocial geek, to his high-flying career in Los Angeles, to his life as a wandering vagabond, Colin holds nothing back as he talks about love, business, blogging, and culture through tales that span four continents. In the easy to digest style of storytelling that has made his other work such a success, Colin discusses life on the road and nothing is too taboo. Every epic, embarrassing, and awkward detail is covered with sometimes brutal honesty.

The swooning Victorian ladies and the 1950s housewives genuinely needed to be liberated. That much is indisputable. So, First-Wave feminists held rallies for women's suffrage. Second-Wave feminists marched for Prohibition, jobs, and abortion. Today, Third-Wave feminists stand firmly for nobody's quite sure what. But modern women--who use psychotherapeutic antidepressants at a rate never before seen in history--need liberating now more than ever. The truth is, feminists don't know what liberation is. They have led us into a very boring dead end. Eve in Exile sets aside all stereotypes of mid-century housewives, of China-doll femininity, of Victorians fainting, of women not allowed to think for themselves or talk to the men about anything interesting or important. It dismisses the pencil-skirted and stiletto-heeled executives of TV, the outspoken feminists freed from all that hinders them, the brave career women in charge of their own destinies. Once those fictionalized stereotypes are out of the way--whether they're things that make you gag or things you think look pretty fun--Christians can focus on real women. What did God make real women for?

Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she has lived in Paris for more than half a century. Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir—stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.

Poet and essayist Fawaz Turki begins his search for answers in the hallways of the 1983 Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers. He then recalls his family's flight into Lebanon when he was eight, childhood in a refugee camp and the streets of Beirut, and years spent in Australia, France, and the United States in search of his identity, both personal and national. In describing this journey, Fawaz Turki also relates the stories of family, friends, and comrades, those who fought the battles and those who walked away from them. Together, these episodes comprise a panoramic history of a generation formed in exile, of a homeless people caught in the violent storm of Middle East politics.