Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work
by Edwidge Danticat
—Reviewed by Deanna Neil
A cultural critic and memoirist, Edwidge Danticat’s elegiac essays reveal the tumultuous histor...
Haitian-born, New York-bred Edwidge Danticat is author of several novels and most recently a collection of essays, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. "Whether or not they write abou...
British writer Christopher Isherwood arrived in Los Angeles after a long, slow bus ride from New York, where he had emigrated with his friend W.H. Auden. After unforgettably chronicling the underworld...
For the past four decades, Juan Felipe Herrera has been a storyteller, teacher, and poet. His writings have been devoted to interpreting—and seeing in new ways—contemporary society in Amer...
Renowned translator and writer Stephen Mitchell, author of The Second Book of the Tao, was in town last week to give a talk at Aloud L.A. He stopped by the Zócalo offices to discuss his latest, and why translating a new work is a bit like becoming enamored with a new woman.
The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America
by Mae Ngai
Hyphenated cultures seem to be a natural part of California’s landscape today, but it wasn’t always so. The Lucky Ones by Mae Ngai offers a fresh look at California history by reconstructing the lives of immigrant and second generation pioneers who lived between cultures when it was not such a common phenomenon. Ngai’s narrative brings Chinese Americans into a richer tradition of historical storytelling by humanizing an ambivalent, middle-class immigrant family, situating their lives within the more well-known histories of Chinese laborers and those who suffered from the 1882 Exclusion Act.
