Noting that feelings of suffering have been largely neglected in academic discussions of the immigrant experience, Hron (English and film, Wilfrid Laurier U., Canada) explores how immigrant writers represent the pain of immigration in fiction. The lynchpin of her comparative explorations of works by North African, Haitian, and Czech immigrant writers is the concept of translation, which refers to the ways immigrants must translate their own images of home, notions of the new country, and their former values and culture into the context of the host country; the ways they translate their experience of immigration into narrative, often in a new language and in a way that must meet the expectations of their target market and target audience; and the ways narratives about immigration translate into popular assumptions, cultural attitudes, and public policies. She argues that in order to meet these requirements of translation, "immigrant writers must engage in a particularly performative rhetoric that both reappropriates and resists generic narrative models and cultural assumptions." Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)