When Oksana's family begins their new American life in Florida after emigrating from Ukraine, her physicist father delivers pizza at night to make ends meet, her depressed mother sits home all day worrying, and her flamboyant grandmother relishes the attention she gets when she walks Oksana to school, not realizing that the street they're walking down is known as Prostitute Street. Oksana just wants to have friends and lead a normal life--and though...

In the small town of Rusty Nail, Minnesota, in the early 1950s, musically talented ten-year-old Franny wants to take advanced piano lessons from newcomer Olga Malenkov, a famous Russian musician suspected of being a communist spy by gossipy members of the community.

Eleven-year-old Jenny, whose family came from Russia to America to start a new life, meets the famous Russian composer on his 1891 trip to the New World and writes about it in her diary.

Follows eleven-year-old Masha and her "evil genius" little sister, Sunny, through one very adventurous day, as Masha faces scary situations, meets new people, and gains new insight into life with her hardworking, single mother.

"When Alexei Lebedev finally comes out to his conservative community, it does not go well. That's how he ended up on the rugged Pacific Crest Trail, hoping he can figure out a new life plan in the thousands of miles it'll take to walk the famed hike. He's prepared for rattlesnakes, blisters, and months of solitude. What he's not prepared for is the ray of sunshine named Ben Caravalho. Charismatic and outgoing, Ben's personality and infectious laughter...

Circus saxophonist Vladimir Ivanoff suddenly defects from his touring troupe in that temple of "Western decadence," Bloomingdale's. He wins asylum and moves into the crowded Harlem flat of Black security guard Lionel Witherspoon. Although Vladimir learns that life in America can be cold and even painful, he grows to love what seems to him a strange and wondrous land.

"An exquisite portrait of mothers and daughters that reaches from Cold War Russia to modern-day New Jersey, from the author of A Mountain of Crumbs--the memoir that 'leaves you wanting more' (The Daily Telegraph, UK). In A Mountain of Crumbs Elena Gorokhova describes coming of age behind the Iron Curtain and leaving her mother and her Motherland for a new life in the United States. Now, in Russian Tattoo, Elena learns that the journey of an immigrant...

In 1903 Brooklyn, fourteen-year-old Joseph Michtom's life changes for the worse when his parents, Russian immigrants, invent the teddy bear and turn their apartment into a factory, while nearby the glitter of Coney Island contrasts with the dismal lives of children dwelling under the Brooklyn Bridge.

Of all the things Anya expected to find at the bottom of an old well, a new friend wasn't one of them. Especially not a new friend who's been dead for a century. Falling down a well is bad enough, but Anya's normal life might actually be worse. She's embarrassed by her family, self-conscious about her body, and she's pretty much given up on fitting in at school. A new friend - even a dead one - is just what she needs. But Anya's new B.F.F. isn't kidding...

Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, the author grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable.