With his third and most ambitious novel, Aciman delivers an elegant and powerful tale of the wages of assimilation—a moving story of an immigrant’s remembered youth and the nearly forgotten costs and sacrifices of becoming an American.

It’s the fall of 1977, and amid the lovely, leafy streets of Cambridge a young Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, longs more than anything to become an assimilated American and a professor of literature. He spends his days in a pleasant blur of seventeenth-century fiction, but when he meets a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver in a Harvard Square café, everything changes. Nicknamed Kalashnikov—Kalaj for short—for his machine-gun vitriol, the cab driver roars into the student’s life with his denunciations of the American obsession with "all things jumbo and ersatz"—Twinkies, monster television sets, all-you-can-eat buffets—and his outrageous declarations on love and the art of seduction. The student finds it hard to resist his new friend’s magnetism, and before long he begins to neglect his studies and live a double life: one in the rarified world of Harvard, the other as an exile with Kalaj on the streets of Cambridge. Together they carouse the bars and cafés around Harvard Square, trade intimate accounts of their love affairs, argue about the American dream, and skinny-dip in Walden Pond. But as final exams loom and Kalaj has his license revoked and is threatened with deportation, the student faces the decision of his life: whether to cling to his dream of New World assimilation or risk it all to defend his Old World friend. Harvard Square is a sexually charged and deeply American novel of identity and aspiration at odds. It is also an unforgettable, moving portrait of an unlikely friendship from one of the finest stylists of our time.

The Man Who Danced with Dolls is a portrait of a family’s legacy—the language of their memories, the secrets of their buried past, and the subway busker whose wordless dancing punctuates their lives.

Over the body of a reservation Indian thrown into a snow bank by a careening car, a coyote stands guard. The eerieness of the desolate scene is never forgotten by the Indian, Black Horse, a man whose peace lies in his painting—a way for him to escape the sordidness of reservation life by putting on canvas the beauty of the place. But this ambition is thwarted almost from the beginning by the prejudice and fears of the whites around him, by the self-defeating attitudes the Indians themselves are prey to—their ignorance and poverty leading them to alcoholism, bitterness, frequent run-ins with the law, and even more frequent stays in the local and state jails. In a novel told dispassionately but deeply felt, the reader shares at once the course of Black Horse's ultimate destiny.

A collection of contemporary American Indian stories and essays by author Raymond Abbott, including pieces published previously in magazines such as the North American Review and Creative Non Fiction. Also collected is the novella "The Axing of Leo White Hat," originally published in 1979 by Applewood Books as part of Death Dances: Two Novellas on North American Indians.