After the loss of her daughter in a freak accident, Maya Lange opens an adoption agency to place baby girls from China with American families and discovers the painful and courageous journeys of both adoptive parents and birth mothers.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of NYRB Classics, a handpicked anthology of selections from the series. In Greek mythology, Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of red thread to guide him through the labyrinth, and the Red Thread offers a path through and a way to explore the ins and outs and twists and turns of the celebrated NYRB Classics series, now twenty years old. The collection brings together twenty-five pieces drawn from the more than five hundred books that have come out as NYRB Classics over the last twenty years. Stories, essays, interviews, poems, along with chapters from novels and memoirs and other longer narratives have been selected by Edwin Frank, the series editor, to chart a distinctive, entertaining, and thought-provoking course across the expansive and varied terrain of the Classics series.

The Red Thread primarily explores the themes of both hope and freedom. Hope for all of us who love God, but who find ourselves struggling with fears and insecurities. And freedom from the stuff that holds us back from living the abundant life promised by Jesus. Writing with honesty about her own identity journey, Lucinda's story of adopting a little girl from China, beautifully illustrates the way that many of us live as spiritual orphans rather than as sons and daughters secure in the love of a Heavenly Father. She suggests that in discovering this truth for ourselves, we will then truly find in Him, a place of safety and security to call home.

You have a terrific idea. You know it is so powerful that it could change a life, a market, or even the world. There's just one problem: others can't, or don't, see it... yet.

This book tells the story of 15,000 wool workers who went on strike for more than a year, defying police violence and hunger. The strikers were mainly immigrants and half were women. The Passaic textile strike, the first time that the Communist Party led a mass workers’ struggle in the United States, captured the nation’s imagination and came to symbolize the struggle of workers throughout the country when the labor movement as a whole was in decline during the conservative, pro-business 1920s. Although the strike was defeated, many of the methods and tactics of the Passaic strike presaged the struggles for industrial unions a decade later in the Great Depression.

When a girl is adopted from a Chinese orphanage, everything she knew about family, best friends, and sisterhood must change. Wen has spent the first eleven years of her life at an orphanage in rural China, and the only person she would call family is her best friend, Shu Ling. When Wen is adopted by an American couple, she struggles to adjust to every part of her new life: having access to all the food and clothes she could want, going to school, being someone's daughter. But the hardest part of all is knowing that Shu Ling remains back at the orphanage, alone. Wen knows that her best friend deserves a family and a future, too. But finding a home for Shu Ling isn't easy, and time is running out . . .

This collection of poems is largely autobiographical, telling the turning points in a life that began in war-torn Vietnam. Somehow, unlike many, Teresa and her family survived, although her parents were separated for a long time. She, her brother, and her mother escaped Vietnam in a ship crowded with frightened immigrants, and in time they settled in California, bringing with them their nightmares, their memories, their history and culture. Family is a recurring and insistent theme in this book. Teresa devotes her art to her grandmother, her mother, her brother, her son. This is the story of a refugee family who settled in California, bringing with them their nightmares, their memories, their history and culture. “Teresa Mei Chuc’s poems speak from the heart of one woman’s experience, and expand beyond the personal to reveal and record the common experienceof multitudes.... The ‘American experience,’ what is it? Chuc’s RedThread offers us all another piece in this difficult puzzle.” -Lowell Jaeger, Editor, New Poets of the American West