Immigrant Short Stories

This fourteen short story collection earned Finalist status in the 2012 Grace Notes Publishing: Discovering the Undiscovered, fiction book Contest. Four of the stories, Challenger, The Curb, The Freight Train, and Los Malandros, were published in anthologies and won awards. Stare into a world of despair and urgency. Mexican immigrant characters in the U.S. struggle to find work, dignity, and purpose. Meanwhile, Mexicans living in the Juarez, Sinaloa, and Gulf cartel occupied areas, struggle to stay alive or find meaning from violence and death. From Jesus, the rookie day laborer who learns ...

A perilous voyage by sea, the difficulties of life in a new country, new friends, and one terrible event, challenge Mette Jensen as she leaves her home in Haderslev, Schleswig determined to start a new life beyond the reach of Prussian Soldiers. With Denmark still reeling from the effects of war over the ownership of Schleswig, two Danish sisters make the difficult decision to leave their homeland. The men of Schleswig, on the border between Denmark and Germany, have already left in droves to avoid being drafted into the Prussian army, and a recruiter from New Zealand has been traveling ...

All is well with longshoreman Uncle Eddie, kindhearted Aunt Beatrice and live-in niece Catherine until the secret guests from Italy arrive and Uncle Eddie turns from generous and welcoming to jealous, difficult and self-serving resulting in disastrous encounters and dark consequences, as a Greek modern tragedy. The story is set in working-class 1950s Brooklyn, in the Red Hook neighborhood with “a view from the bridge.” The book is the prose version of Arthur Miller’s 1955 play and it is perfect for a pleasant and intensive reading. It comes with an introduction, with notes and ...

In these deeply felt, slyly humorous stories, Bezmozgis pleads no special causes but presents immigrant characters with all their contradictions and complexities, their earnest and divided hearts.

In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on first through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”

Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret - Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these 11 stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life.

Spanning several decades, Ghassan Zeineddine’s debut collection examines the diverse range and complexities of the Arab-American community in Dearborn, Michigan. In ten tragicomic stories, Zeineddine explores themes of identity, generational conflicts, war trauma, migration, sexuality, queerness, home and belonging, and more.

"Her immediate concern was money." So begins the first story in Manuel Muñoz's dazzling new collection. In it, Delfina has moved from Texas to California's Central Valley with her husband and small son, and her isolation and desperation force her to take a risk that ends in profound betrayal.

From the bustling streets of America to the quiet mountain towns in rural China, this captivating collection of short stories spans continents and cultures, weaving a tapestry of universal human experiences. Each tale offers a unique glimpse into lives shaped by love, betrayal, and the search for identity. These stories, by turns humorous and poignant, explore the intricate threads that connect us all—the joy of friendship, the pain of betrayal, the challenges of coming of age, and the bittersweet realities of leaving one's homeland. With its rich diversity of settings and emotions, this ...

On Ash Wednesday in 1908, Swiss German immigrant Fritz Hirter arrives at his children’s school, where he is the lone custodian. But soon after lessons start, a fast-moving fire breaks out—its cause is unknown, but its effects are horrifying. Although Fritz is soon cleared of any responsibility for the catastrophe, the community continues to suspect him, supremely testing Fritz and his family.

When the magical secrets of The Emerald Isle beckon, will she survive answering the call? Ohio, 1846. Valentia McDowell wishes she could rest. Plagued by nightmares of her grandmother’s mysterious brooch lost in Ireland, the well-off young woman aches to find her lost family in Ireland. But as she dodges marriage proposals from odious local farmers, she can’t shake the sense that a powerful inheritance awaits her across the ocean… if she can weather the treacherous journey. Can Valentia uphold a destiny she doesn’t yet understand without losing everyone she loves? An Immigrant's ...

The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women—immigrants or the descendants of immigrants—who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism on what they call the Island. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. Set in locations and times ranging from 1950s London to 1960s Panama to modern-day New Jersey, Dionne Irving reveals the intricacies of immigration and assimilation in this debut, establishing a new and unforgettable voice in Caribbean-American literature.

Revenge isn't always sweet. Can her captive heart be freed to dream, to dare, to love? A quest for revenge ends in a marriage of convenience and a feisty Irish lass discovers that not everything is as it seems as family secrets are revealed. An Irish cop, bent on saving the fallen women of Five Points, New York, finds himself thrust into the role of husband with a woman determined to break down a notorious crime boss. Can these two pull together and find a love bigger than they are?

Compelling and perceptive, Tomb Sweeping probes the loyalties we hold: to relatives, to strangers, and to ourselves. In stories set across the US and Asia, Alexandra Chang immerses us in the lives of immigrant families, grocery store employees, expecting parents, and guileless lab assistants.

From a Hong Kong movie idol fleeing a sex scandal to an obedient daughter turned Stanford pretender, from a Chinatown elder summoned to his village to a Korean American pastor with a secret agenda, the characters in the collection illustrate the conflict between self and society, tradition and change. In "What We Have Is What We Need", winner of the Atlantic's Student Writing Contest, a boy from Mexico reunites with his parents in San Francisco. When he suspects his mother has found love elsewhere, he fights to keep his family together.

From the internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies comes an exquisitely crafted work of fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri sets her gaze on the eternally beautiful city, illuminating the frailties of the human condition and dissecting lives lived on the margins.

Mohsina, daughter of Muslim immigrants to America, is a college student who is very vocal in her arguments against her professor’s anti-Islam rhetoric about Muslim women being forced into unwanted marriages…until her parents try to force her into an unwanted marriage.

What constitutes a border? In the geographical sense, they consist of areas defined by rivers, mountains, and deserts. Physically a boundary prevents people from doing what they choose to do—and sometimes keeps them from harm. When a mental frontier limits you, who powers this abstraction? Why you do...of course.

The author of the widely praised Lunch with a Bigot gives us a remarkable novel - reminiscent of Teju Cole, W. G. Sebald and John Berger - about a young new immigrant to the United States in search of love: across dividing lines between cultures, between sexes, and between the particular desires of one man and the women he comes to love.

Ladies of the Night is set in Toronto and Antigua. With women's loves and lives as their focus, the stories contain dramatic twists and turns: some humorous, others shocking and disturbing, all leaving a haunting melody behind. The Toronto stories capture the issues women face as they walk the ground of intimate and family relationships in that city. The Antiguan setting of some of the stories are reflective of Prince's insight into relationships, captured in her novel and essays.