In luminous prose, award-winning author Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of unforgettable characters who are forced to make moral choices, and choices for survival, in China in the late 1970s. Shortlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River. A young woman, Gu Shan, a bold spirit and a follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent. Her distraught mother, determined to follow the custom of burning her only child’s clothing to ease her journey into the next world, is about to make another bold decision. Shan’s father, Teacher Gu, who has already, in his heart and mind, buried his rebellious daughter, begins to retreat into memories. Neither of them imagines that their daughter’s death will have profound and far-reaching effects, in Muddy River and beyond. In luminous prose, Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of these and other unforgettable characters, including a serious seven-year-old boy, Tong; a crippled girl named Nini; the sinister idler Bashi; and Kai, a beautiful radio news announcer who is married to a man from a powerful family. Life in a world of oppression and pain is portrayed through stories of resilience, sacrifice, perversion, courage, and belief. We read of delicate moments and acts of violence by mothers, sons, husbands, neighbors, wives, lovers, and more, as Gu Shan’s execution spurs a brutal government reaction. Writing with profound emotion, and in the superb tradition of fiction by such writers as Orhan Pamuk and J. M. Coetzee, Yiyun Li gives us a stunning novel that is at once a picture of life in a special part of the world during a historic period, a universal portrait of human frailty and courage, and a mesmerizing work of art. Praise for The Vagrants “She bridges our world to the Chinese world with a mind that is incredibly supple and subtle.”—W Magazine “A Balzacian look at one community’s suppressed loves and betrayals.”—Vogue “A sweeping novel of struggle, survival, and love in the time of oppression. . . . [an] illuminating, morally complex, and symphonic novel.”—O Magazine

The riveting story of control over the mobility of poor migrants, and how their movements shaped current perceptions of class and status in the United States Vagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants – consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves – populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations. Vagrants and Vagabonds examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called “vagrants,” arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US. Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic.

Wordsworth's Vagrants explores the poet's treatment of the 'idle and disorderly' in the context of the penal laws of the 1790s, when the terror of the French Revolution caused a crackdown on the beggars and vagrants who roamed the English countryside. From the Salisbury Plain poems through to Lyrical Ballads, Quentin Bailey's readings are sensitive to Wordsworth's early radicalism without equating his socio-political engagement solely with support for the French Revolution.

This acclaimed book explores popular politics during Mexico's tumultuous post-independence decades. Focusing on Mexico City during the chaotic early years of the nineteenth century, Richard A. Warren offers a compelling narrative of the defining period from King Ferdinand VII's abdication of the Spanish crown in 1808 to the end of Mexico's first federal republic in 1836. Clearly written and meticulously researched, this book is the first to demonstrate that the relationship between elites and the urban masses was central to Mexico's political evolution during the fight for independence and after. Mexico City, capital of both the old viceroyalty and the new nation, often witnessed the first wave of "public opinion" to respond to competing political proposals in both traditional and new forms that ranged from riots to electoral campaigns. Warren explains the direct effects of these actions on political outcomes, as well as their influence on elite perceptions of the new nation's problems and potential solutions. Vagrants and Citizens explores the impact of urban mass mobilization on crucial issues of the era, such as the evolution of electoral practices, the conflict between federalists and centralists, and social control programs. Shedding new light on a poorly understood era, Warren demonstrates the importance of the urban masses both as actors in their own right and as objects of elite discourse and programs. His compelling narrative offers an ideal supplement for courses on Mexican and Latin American history.

An exploration of the causes and patterns of avian vagrancy Avian vagrancy—the appearance of birds outside of their expected habitat—is a phenomenon that has fascinated natural historians for centuries, from Victorian collectors willing to spend fortunes on a rare specimen to today’s bird-chasing “twitchers.” Yet despite the obsessions of countless ornithologists, what do we actually know about the enigma of vagrancy? In Vagrancy in Birds, Alexander Lees and James Gilroy explore the causes, patterns, and processes behind the occurrences of these unique birds. Lees and Gilroy draw on recent research to answer fundamental questions: What causes avian vagrancy? Why do some places attract so many vagrant birds? Why are some species more predisposed to long-range vagrancy than others? The authors present readers with everything known about the subject, and bring together different lines of evidence to make the case for vagrancy as a biological phenomenon with important implications for avian ecology and evolution. Filled with a wealth of photographs, Vagrancy in Birds will fascinate avian enthusiasts everywhere.

Vagrants & Accidentals, the second full-length collection from poet Kevin Craft, is part vade mecum, part songbook, whose taut lines and adaptable stanzas traffic in the personal effects of emigration and estrangement, exile and return. In ornithology, a vagrant or accidental is a bird that appears out of its natural or normal range, blown off course by a storm, or inadvertently introduced into a new environment by human trade. Likewise, Craft is interested in things taken out of context--Greek myths in the Pacific Northwest, the potsherd or megalith stranded in a museum, excess carbon in the atmosphere, American pop songs in a Roman piazza, adoptions, estrangements, dangerous migrations, the constant shuffle of human beings from place to place�asking how we reorient ourselves in the crossfire of constant, rapid, global transformation. Organized into four parts, the collection moves from the deeply personal to more global issues of interconnectedness. In language intensely lyrical, grounded in prehistory and science, Craft evokes questions of family and belonging that underscore a lifetime, gradually revealing the forces that shape us from the deepest reaches of time and place. As some birds sing to define their territory, so his poetry calls between the raggedness of daily life and our deeper yearning for coherence.