Books in the Library of American Fiction series

Set before the Holocaust in the tiny Polish shtetl of Proszowice, each interconnected story follows the young protagonist through the pleasures and humiliations of childhood and rites of manhood, as he fights against historical, social and psychological forces that threaten to pull him down.

After her husband's death, Ginny Gillespie travels with his ashes to Paris, where she meets and falls in love with Roland Keppi, a strange, visionary man without a country. But when Roland is deported to a German camp for people without identity papers, their dreamlike affair is disrupted.

Young Danny Meyer's bubble-like existence in paradisal Madison is broken when his father is stricken with illness. The family is forced to move to Milwaukee where they struggle at the brink of poverty. Here, Danny must accept the responsibilities of manhood while still struggling with adolescence.

Matt Glassman builds a relationship with the one person, his grandmother, who might know the truth about his grandfather's disappearance. She's remained stubbornly reticent on the topic all these years, but when a familiar old man shows up at Glassman's office he thinks he may finally get some answers.

The stories collected in This Is Not the Tropics come from the geographic center of a divided nation, and its protagonists evoke a split personality - one half submerged in America's own diehard mythology, the other half searching to escape tradition.