Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home
by Nicole Chung, Mensah Demary
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2020
240 pages
Genre: Essays
Publication Information
From rediscovering an ancestral village in China to experiencing the realities of American life as a Nigerian, the search for belonging crosses borders and generations. Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, the essays in A Map Is Only One Story highlight the human side of immigration policies and polarized rhetoric, as twenty writers share provocative personal stories of existing between languages and cultures.
Victoria Blanco relates how those with family in both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez experience life on the border. Nina Li Coomes recalls the heroines of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and what they taught her about her bicultural identity. Nur Nasreen Ibrahim details her grandfather's crossing of the India-Pakistan border sixty years after Partition. Krystal A. Sital writes of how undocumented status in the United States can impact love and relationships. Porochista Khakpour describes the challenges in writing (and rewriting) Iranian America. Through the power of personal narratives, as told by both emerging and established writers, A Map Is Only One Story offers a new definition of home in the twenty-first century.
"A standout collection that adds new dimension and depth to the lived experiences of immigrants long after they settle in a new community." - Library Journal (starred review)
"This collection is a vital corrective to discussions of global migration that fail to acknowledge the humanity of migrants themselves." - Publishers Weekly
"Fierce and diverse, these essays tell personal stories that humanize immigration in unique, necessary ways. A provocatively intelligent collection." - Kirkus Reviews
"Each narrative draws readers close, offering sight lines into private lives and conflicts. The talented writers gathered here offer wide-ranging perspectives essential for our current environment." - Booklist
"A vast, astute collection exploring questions of identity and belonging. A Map Is Only One Story is about margins, ideas of home, migration, and the violence of borders, but it's also so capacious that it's impossible to summarize. Candid and devastating." - R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
"Moving and intimate. These disparate voices come into their power when they reach beyond the broken self toward something greater—love, kindness, family—even as homes are lost, pride shattered, identities remade." - Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee
"A Map Is Only One Story has a kaleidoscopic effect, breaking our image of the world with fixed borders and identities to create something new again and again. In this anthology, finding home is more than just a search for a place, but for a way to exist. Funny, poignant, and thought-provoking." - Akil Kumarasamy, author of Half Gods
This information about A Map Is Only One Story was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nicole Chung is the editor in chief of Catapult magazine and the author of All You Can Ever Know.
Mensah Demary is a founding editor of Catapult magazine and editor at large of Catapult Books.
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