Bücher veröffentlicht von Algonquin Books

"Oscar Wilde, his wife, Constance, and their two sons deal with the aftermath of the famous playwright's imprisonment for homosexuality, told against the backdrop of Victorian England and World War I"--

A page-turning, character-driven story set in 2003 New York City about a genderqueer book conservator who feels trapped by her gender presentation, her ill-fitting relationship, and her artistic block, as she discovers a decades-old hidden queer love letter and becomes obsessed with tracking down its author.

"A delightful and courageous tale and a romping good read. Voila!" -Mark Greenside, author of I'll Never Be French (No Matter What I Do) William Alexander is more than a Francophile. He wants to be French. There's one small obstacle though: he doesn't speak la langue française. In Flirting with French, Alexander sets out to conquer the language he loves. But will it love him back? Alexander eats, breathes, and sleeps French (even conjugating in his dreams). He travels to France, where mistranslations send him bicycling off in all sorts of wrong directions, and he nearly drowns in an immersion class in Provence, where, faced with the riddle of masculine breasts, feminine beards, and a turkey cutlet of uncertain gender, he starts to wonder whether he should've taken up golf instead of French. While playing hooky from grammar lessons and memory techniques, Alexander reports on the riotous workings of the Académie française, the four-hundred-year-old institution charged with keeping the language pure; explores the science of human communication, learning why it's harder for fifty-year-olds to learn a second language than it is for five-year-olds; and, frustrated with his progress, explores an IBM research lab, where he trades barbs with a futuristic hand-held translator. Does he succeed in becoming fluent? Readers will be as surprised as Alexander is to discover that, in a fascinating twist, studying French may have had a far greater impact on his life than actually learning to speak it ever would. "A blend of passion and neuroscience, this literary love affair offers surprise insights into the human brain and the benefits of learning a second language. Reading William Alexander's book is akin to having an MRI of the soul." -Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of Sleeping Arrangements "Alexander proves that learning a new language is an adventure of its own--with all the unexpected obstacles, surprising breakthroughs and moments of sublime pleasure traveling brings." -Julie Barlow, author of Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong

Like most of us, Lauren Winner wants something to believe in. The child of a reform Jewish father and a lapsed Southern Baptist mother, she chose to become an Orthodox Jew. But as she faithfully observes the Sabbath rituals and studies Jewish laws, she finds herself increasingly drawn to Christianity. Taking a courageous step, she leaves behind what she loves and converts. Now the even harder part: How does one reinvent a religious self? How does one embrace the new without abandoning the old? How does a convert become spiritually whole.In Girl Meets God, this appealingly honest young woman takes us through a year in her search for a religious identity. Despite her conversion, she finds that her world is still shaped by her Jewish experiences. Even as she rejoices in the holy days of the Christian calendar, she mourns the Jewish rituals she still holds dear. Attempting to reconcile the two sides of her religious self, Winner applies the lessons of Judaism to the teachings of the New Testament, hosts a Christian seder, and struggles to fit her Orthodox friends into her new religious life.Ultimately she learns that faith takes practice and belief is an ongoing challenge. Like Anne Lamott's, Winner's journey to Christendom is bumpy, but it is the rocky path itself that makes her a perfect guide to exploring spirituality in today's complicated world. Her engaging approach to religion in the twenty-first century is illuminating, thought-provoking, and most certainly controversial.

Michael Parker's vast and involving novel about pirates and slaves, treason and treasures, madness and devotion, takes place on a tiny island battered by storms and cut off from the world. Inspired by two little-known moments in history, it begins in 1813, when Theodosia Burr, en route to New York by ship to meet her father, Aaron Burr, disappears off the coast of North Carolina. It ends a hundred and fifty years later, when the last three inhabitants of a remote island?two elderly white women and the black man who takes care of them?are forced to leave their beloved spot of land. Parker tells an enduring story about what we'll sacrifice for love, and what we won't.

In his prime, Edward Bloom was an extraordinary man. He could outrun anybody. He never missed a day of school. He saved lives and tamed giants. Animals loved him, people loved him, women loved him. He knew more jokes than any man alive. At least that's what he told his son, William. But now Edward Bloom is dying, and William wants desperately to know the truth about his elusive father-this indefatigable teller of tall tales-before it's too late. So, using the few facts he knows, William re-creates Edward's life in a series of legends and myths, through which he begins to understand his father's great feats, and his great failings. The result is hilarious and wrenching, tender and outrageous.

Award-winning author Amy Stewart takes readers on an around-the-world, behind-the-scenes look at the flower industry and how it has sought?for better or worse?to achieve perfection. She tracks down the hybridizers, geneticists, farmers, and florists working to invent, manufacture, and sell flowers that are bigger, brighter, and sturdier than anything nature can provide. There's a scientist intent on developing the first genetically modified blue rose; an eccentric horitcultural legend who created the most popular lily; a breeder of gerberas of every color imaginable; and an Ecuadorean farmer growing exquisite roses, the floral equivalent of a Tiffany diamond. And, at every turn she discovers the startling intersection of nature and technology, of sentiment and commerce.

Beginning with Milly and Charlie Diamond, a long-married couple facing the world hand in hand, The Family Diamond lays bare the lasting imprint our families make on us?for better and for worse. In these nine stories we see glimpses of our own families: when Charlie offers advice to his lovesick grandson; when a young man tries to repair his relationship with his estranged brother; and when siblings unexpectedly reunite at a hospital bedside. And when we meet up with Milly and Charlie again, in the final story, they have mysteriously regained their youth and are trying to explain to their friends?and to themselves?this unbelievable reversal of fortune.

"Incredible . . . Inspiring . . . Important." -Library Journal, starred review "A marvelous yarn, loaded with near-calamitous adventures and characters as memorable as Singer creations." -The New York Post "What began as a quixotic journey was also a picaresque romp, a detective story, a profound history lesson, and a poignant evocation of a bygone world." -The Boston Globe "Every now and again a book with near-universal appeal comes along: Outwitting History is just such a book." -The Sunday Oregonian As a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, Aaron Lansky set out to save the world's abandoned Yiddish books before it was too late. Today, more than a million books later, he has accomplished what has been called "the greatest cultural rescue effort in Jewish history." In Outwitting History, Lansky shares his adventures as well as the poignant and often laugh-out-loud stories he heard as he traveled the country collecting books. Introducing us to a dazzling array of writers, he shows us how an almost-lost culture is the bridge between the old world and the future-and how the written word can unite everyone who believes in the power of great literature.A Library Journal Best Book A Massachusetts Book Award Winner in Nonfiction An ALA Notable Book

Janusz Korczak was a Polish physician and educator who wrote over twenty books--his fiction was in his time as well known as "Peter Pan," and his nonfiction works bore passionate messages of child advocacy. During World War II, the Jewish orphanage he directed was relocated to the Warsaw ghetto. Although Korczak's celebrity afforded him many chances to escape, he refused to abandon the children. He was killed at Treblinka along with the children.

One of the joys of reading is coming across a novel in which the author's voice is so perfectly wedded to an important subject that the blending becomes art. Such a novel is Irene Zabytko's THE SKY UNWASHED, wherein the inexplicable events of the larger world are broken down into the small constituent tragedies which lie at the core and which history too often overlooks. Zabytko's voice become the voice of the forgotten in a moving and memorable book. --W.D. Wetherell author of CHEKHOV'S SISTER and THE MAN WHO LOVED LEVITTOWN

The editor and publisher of the Delta Democrat-Times liked a good fight. Using his little daily paper to battle for equality before the law and an end to mistreatment of black people, Hodding Carter took on the power structure of the state of Mississippi. Castigated by politicians, denounced by his fellow editors, threatened with economic reprisal and physical violence, he drew the wrath of everyone from the country club to the crossroads store. White Citizens Councils anathematized him. The Ku Klux Klan sent him threatening messages. What kind of a man was this who stuck to his guns - for a time he even kept a gun close by - for what he believed, in the face of anger and vitriol, detestation and denunciation? In Hodding Carter, Ann Waldron tells the story of a colorful, complex, combative man who spent much of his life on the unpopular sides of political and social issues. As a youth sent off to college in Maine, he was an outspoken white supremacist; he began changing his mind only when he came back home to the South to live. Nor was his battle for racial justice in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s his first fight against heavy odds: in the early 1930s, as editor of a tiny newspaper in Hammond, Louisiana, he fought the Louisiana Kingfish, Huey Long, and his powerful machine. Nor did Carter confine his writing to newspaper journalism. He wrote books, magazine articles, history, novels, poetry. Married to a woman who was equally courageous and who stood loyally and firmly with him in his outspoken, unpopular stands, he was passionate, creative, greatly complicated. His friends cherished him, his opponents abhorred him. No uncritical eulogy, Hodding Carter re-creates the passionate life, public and private, of a flawed but authentic American hero.

Raised by his mother in a one-room house in the slums of Casablanca, Youssef El Mekki has always had big dreams of living another life in another world. Suddenly his dreams are within reach when he discovers that his father-whom he'd been led to believe was dead-is very much alive. A wealthy businessman, he seems eager to give his son a new start. Youssef leaves his mother behind to live a life of luxury, until a reversal of fortune sends him back to the streets and his childhood friends. Trapped once again by his class and painfully aware of the limitations of his prospects, he becomes easy prey for a fringe Islamic group.In the spirit of The Inheritance of Loss and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Laila Lalami's debut novel looks at the struggle for identity, the need for love and family, and the desperation that grips ordinary lives in a world divided by class, politics, and religion.

Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop. Forced to move to a new city, with her strict African American grandmother as her guardian, Rachel is thrust for the first time into a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring a constant stream of attention her way. It''s there, as she grows up and tries to swallow her grief, that she comes to understand how the mystery and tragedy of her mother might be connected to her own uncertain identity. This searing and heartwrenching portrait of a young biracial girl dealing with society''s ideas of race and class is the winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice.

In her sweeping debut novel, Elizabeth J. Church takes us from the World War II years in Chicago to the vast sun-parched canyons of New Mexico in the 1970s as we follow the journey of a driven, spirited young woman, Meridian Wallace, whose scientific ambitions are subverted by the expectations of her era. In 1941, at seventeen years old, Meridian begins her ornithology studies at the University of Chicago. She is soon drawn to Alden Whetstone, a brilliant, complicated physics professor who opens her eyes to the fundamentals and poetry of his field, the beauty of motion, space and time, the delicate balance of force and energy that allows a bird to fly. Entranced and in love, Meridian defers her own career path and follows Alden west to Los Alamos, where he is engaged in a secret government project (later known to be the atomic bomb). In married life, though, she feels lost and left behind. She channels her academic ambitions into studying a particular family of crows, whose free life and companionship are the very things that seem beyond her reach. There in her canyons, years later at the dawn of the 1970s, with counterculture youth filling the streets and protests against the war rupturing college campuses across the country, Meridian meets Clay, a young geologist and veteran of the Vietnam War, and together they seek ways to mend what the world has broken. Exquisitely capturing the claustrophobic eras of 1940s and 1950s America, The Atomic Weight of Love also examines the changing roles of women during the decades that followed. And in Meridian Wallace we find an unforgettable heroine whose metamorphosis shows how the women's movement opened up the world for a whole generation.