The Mother House

One of the Best Books of the Year: Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Vulture • This uncompromising look at the immigrant experience, and the depravity of one man, is an electrifying page-turner rooted in a magical reality • “Impossible to stop reading” —Vulture When Lucien flees Haiti with his wife, Marie-Ange, and their three children to New York City’s South Ozone Park, he does so hoping for reinvention, wealth, and comfort. He buys a run-down house in a quickly changing community, and begins life anew. Lucien and Marie-Ange call their home La Kay—“my mother’s house”—and it becomes a place where their fellow immigrants can find peace, a good meal, and necessary legal help. But as a severely emotionally damaged man emigrating from a country whose evils he knows to one whose evils he doesn’t, Lucien soon falls into his worst habits and impulses, with La Kay as the backdrop for his lasciviousness. What he can’t begin to fathom is that the house is watching, passing judgment, and deciding to put an end to all the sins it has been made to hold. But only after it has set itself aflame will frightened whispers reveal Lucien’s ultimate evil.

A heartwarming story of family, love, and celebrating what makes us special, from master storyteller Patricia Polacco, author of Thank You, Mr. Falker. Marmee, Meema, and the kids are just like any other family on the block. In their cozy home, they cook dinner together, they laugh together, they dance and play together. But one family doesn't accept them. Maybe because they think they are different: How can a family have two moms and no dad? But Marmee and Meema's house is full of love. And they teach their children that different doesn't mean wrong. No matter how many moms or dads they have, they are everything a family is meant to be. Celebrated author-illustrator Patricia Polacco inspires young readers with this message of a wonderful family living by its own rules, held together by a very special love.

In My Mother’s House depicts a profound, intergenerational struggle between a powerful, politically engaged mother, Rose, and her spiritually inclined poet and writer daughter, Kim. Framing this collision are two other generations. There is Rose’s mother from the shtetl, a broken woman regularly beaten by her husband but the source of the family’s stories. And Kim’s daughter, a second-generation, fully assimilated girl of eight at the time the book begins. Four generations, from the shtetl to an affluent intellectual household in Berkeley, California, the story is a historical record and reckoning between the old activist left and a beginning feminist movement. The double narrative allows Kim to explore the evolving relationship between mother and daughter, who, through their storytelling, are brought to a profound understanding and reconciliation.

"A mother through the eyes of a baby: a mother's a mirror, a doctor, a story, the top of a mountain, a mother's a home"--Back cover.

This work reevaluates the biblical house of the father in light of the anthropological critique of the patrilineal model. It uncovers and defines the contours of an underappreciated yet socially significant kinship unit in the Bible: 'the house of the mother.'

In May 2009, the Sri Lankan army overwhelmed the last stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam—better known as the Tamil Tigers—officially bringing an end to nearly three decades of civil war. Although the war has ended, the place of minorities in Sri Lanka remains uncertain, not least because the lengthy conflict drove entire populations from their homes. The figures are jarring: for example, all of the roughly 80,000 Muslims in northern Sri Lanka were expelled from the Tamil Tiger-controlled north, and nearly half of all Sri Lankan Tamils were displaced during the course of the civil war. Sharika Thiranagama's In My Mother's House provides ethnographic insight into two important groups of internally displaced people: northern Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims. Through detailed engagement with ordinary people struggling to find a home in the world, Thiranagama explores the dynamics within and between these two minority communities, describing how these relations were reshaped by violence, displacement, and authoritarianism. In doing so, she illuminates an often overlooked intraminority relationship and new social forms created through protracted war. In My Mother's House revolves around three major themes: ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement; transformations of familial experience; and the impact of the political violence—carried out by both the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan state—on ordinary lives and public speech. Her rare focus on the effects and responses to LTTE political regulation and violence demonstrates that envisioning a peaceful future for postconflict Sri Lanka requires taking stock of the new Tamil and Muslim identities forged by the civil war. These identities cannot simply be cast away with the end of the war but must be negotiated anew.

A young Tewa Indian describes the homes, customs, work, and strong communal spirit of his people.

Unwilling to see Asian American women silenced beneath the noisy discourses of feminists, cultural nationalists, and Eurocentric historians, Wendy Ho turns to specific spoken stories of mothers and daughters. Against reductive tendencies of scholarship, she places her own conversations with her China-born grandmother and her U.S.-born mother and her own readings of other Asian American women writers. She finds in the writings of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Fae Myenne Ng not only complex mother-daughter relationships but many-faceted relationships to fathers, family, community, and culture. Always resisting the simplistic explanations, In Her Mother's House brings Asian American women's experience as mothers and daughters to the forefront of gender and ethnicity.

Twenty-five houses designed by currently practicing architects.

The Mother House is rich with images of orphans, exiles, migrants, decay, destruction, famine, disaster, the cloistered, the drowned, the marginalized, as well as disappearance and memory, music and loss. The poems speak of histories, in Ireland and elsewhere, as allegories of our age. Yet, the poetic is not offered as a salvo or a salve, for as the poet questions, "We made the long journey // to deliver the gesture, but who has noticed us?" Ní Chuilleanain nevertheless proves that when the mirror is held at the right angle, the past can shed a telling light upon the present, observing with great acumen, "it was like history, held there / in view of another lifetime." In this remarkable volume, art and literature reflect human suffering and survival across many frontiers.