2019-20 Common Book Explores Immigrants at the Border

WILLIAM H. HANNON LIBRARY | Valeria Luiselli’s award-winning nonfiction book “Tell Me How It Ends has been selected as the 2019-20 LMU Common Book. Her narrative of immigrant children’s experiences provides a gritty, nuts-and-bolts window into the immigration process that highlights a brutal reality of human experience at our southern border.

The LMU Common Book program is designed to unite the LMU community in a common intellectual endeavor that goes beyond the classroom. Luiselli’s book will offer a touchstone for discussing meaningful and contemporary issues related to immigration, child detention and border control. Moreover, the book’s accessible and elegant prose provides space for conversations about forms of narrative, rhetoric and stylistics. The Guardian review said, “In this compelling, devastating book, Luiselli documents the huge injustices done to the children by both the American and Mexican governments, and by the public who treat them as ‘illegal aliens,’ rather than as what they truly are: refugees of war.”

Luiselli worked as an interpreter for dozens of children and teen migrants who crossed Mexico to reach the United States, needing help as they pressed their legal cases for asylum. She structured her book on the 40 questions that are asked of those undocumented Central American children facing deportation. “Tell Me How It Ends” was the winner of an American Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism and the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.

The Hannon Library staff and the Common Book Planning Committee hope that the latest selection serves as a mechanism through which all members of the LMU community – students, faculty and staff – can share a common experience through the uncommon discoveries in reading. Faculty members are encouraged to adopt “Tell Me How It Ends” in their courses. The Common Book planning committee will also be working over the summer to develop related campus programs and events.

For more information, or to share ideas for a program or collaboration related to the Common Book, contact commonbook@lmu.edu.

 

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