Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village
- Location(s): Iraq
- Genre(s): Autobiography/Memoirs
- Era(s): late 20th century
A delightful, well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study, this is an account of Fernea’s two-year stay in a tiny rural village in Iraq, where she assumed the dress and sheltered life of a harem woman. This volume gives a...
- Location(s): Russia
- Genre(s): Fiction, Historical
- Era(s): 1850s
He is considered one of the greatest novelists in any language in all of human history, but many of Leo Tolstoy’s works remain obscure today. This short novel, published posthumously and recommended by Harold Bloom in his Western Canon,...
- Location(s): Berlin
- Genre(s): Fiction
- Era(s): 1980s
Charming and talented Alex dreams of becoming a professional saxophonist while working long hours in the family bakery. Detlef, lonely, repressed, and a small-time Stasi informer, develops an obsessive love for him. But Alex has eyes only for Nicky,...
- Location(s): Arizona, Texas
- Genre(s): Nonfiction
- Era(s): 1920s
Half Broke Horses, set in Texas and Arizona, is a true life novel of Lily Casey Smith, author Jeannette Walls’s sassy, swaggering pioneer grandma. Fans of Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle will appreciate going deeper into the Walls family...