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Words matter: they mold and mirror our values and our reality. And so it is with the language we use to think and talk about species other than our own. In Tongue-Tied, Hanh Nguyen unpacks the many metaphors, meanings, and grammatical formulations that speak to and echo our physical exploitation of other-than-human animals, and shows how they constrain our abilities to relate to our animal kin fairly and honestly. Full of subtle insights and richly suggestive observations, and drawing from Nguyen’s own cross-cultural experiences, Tongue-Tied offers a glimpse of a language that is freed from euphemistic self-deception, one that accepts definition without limitation and difference without hierarchy.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, the Communist Party embraced a policy to promote national consciousness among the Soviet Union’s many national minorities as a means of Sovietizing them. In Ukraine, Ukrainian-language schooling, coupled with pedagogical innovation, was expected to serve as the lynchpin of this social transformation for the republic’s children. The first detailed archival study of the local implications of Soviet nationalities policy, Breaking the Tongue examines the implementation of the Ukrainization of schools and children’s organizations. Matthew D. Pauly demonstrates that Ukrainization faltered because of local resistance, a lack of resources, and Communist Party anxieties about nationalism and a weakening of Soviet power – a process that culminated in mass arrests, repression, and a fundamental adjustment in policy.
Set in the American South in the years before and during the Civil War, John Wray’s hypnotic new novel is at once a crime story, a bravura work of historical fiction, and a fire-and-brimstone meditation on American credulity and corruption. Thaddeus Morelle’s followers call him “the Redeemer.” Over the years he has led the Island 37 Gang from stealing horses to stealing slaves in an enterprise so nefarious that both the Union and Confederacy have placed a bounty on their heads. But now Morelle is dead, murdered by his puppet and protégé, Virgil Ball, who may rid himself of the Redeemer but can never be free of his Trade. Based on the true story of John Murrell, a figure once as infamous as Jesse James, Canaan’s Tongue is suspenseful and fiercely comic, a modern masterpiece of the American grotesque.
First published in 1984, Native Tongue earned wide critical praise, and cult status as well. Set in the twenty-second century after the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment, the novel reveals a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights, and banned from public life. In this world, Earth’s wealth relies on interplanetary commerce, for which the population depends on linguists, a small, clannish group of families whose women breed and become perfect translators of all the galaxies’ languages. The linguists wield power, but live in isolated compounds, hated by the population, and in fear of class warfare. But a group of women is destined to challenge the power of men and linguists. Nazareth, the most talented linguist of her family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for the government, supervising the children’s language education in the Alien-in-Residence interface chambers, running the compound, and caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth does not yet know is that a clandestine revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them of men’s domination. Their secret must, above all, be kept until the language is ready for use. The women’s language, Láadan, is only one of the brilliant creations found in this stunningly original novel, which combines a page-turning plot with challenging meditations on the tensions between freedom and control, individuals and communities, thought and action. A complete work in itself, it is also the first volume in Elgin’s acclaimed Native Tongue trilogy.
Based on the shocking Beslan school siege in 2004, this is a brave and necessary story about grief, resilience, and finding your voice in the aftermath of tragedy. On the day she brings her sweet little sister, Nika, to school for the first time, eighteen-year-old Darya has already been taking care of her family for years. But a joyous September morning shifts in an instant when Darya’s rural Russian town is attacked by terrorists. While Darya manages to escape, Nika is one of hundreds of children taken hostage in the school in what stretches to a three-day siege and ends in violence. In the confusion and horror that follow, Darya and her family frantically scour hospitals and survivor lists in hopes that Nika has somehow survived. And as journalists and foreign aid workers descend on her small town, Darya is caught in the grip of grief and trauma, trying to recover her life and wondering if there is any hope for her future. From acclaimed author Julie Mayhew comes a difficult but powerful narrative about pain, purpose, and healing in the wake of senseless terror.
Sexy, sophisticated, and infused with the sights and sounds of Paris, this enchanting debut novel is a humorous, poignant look at one woman trying to understand who she is in two countries.
Emotionally raw and emphatically sensual, Tongue is the story of the demise of an obsessive romance, and a woman's culinary journey toward self-restoration and revenge. When her boyfriend of seven years leaves her for another woman, the celebrated young chef Jung Ji-won shuts down the cooking school she ran from their home and sinks into deep depression, losing her will to cook, her desire to eat, and even her ability to taste. Returning to the kitchen of the Italian restaurant where her career first began, she slowly rebuilds her life, rediscovering her appreciation of food, both as nourishment and as sensual pleasure. She also starts to devise a plan for a final, vengeful act of culinary seduction. Tongue is a voluptuous, intimate story of a gourmet relying on her food-centric worldview to emerge from heartbreak, a mesmerizing, delicately plotted novel at once shocking and profoundly familiar.
The words we speak have power. Often the consequences of our careless words are far reaching and eternal. At one time or another we all have experienced saying something in a moment that takes hours (or weeks or a lifetime) to make right. In his engaging teaching style, Dr. R. T. Kendall helps you learn how to take control of the words you speak. He brings you straight to the Bible to identify characters who spoke without thinking as examples of how not to do things, demonstrating conclusively through their lives that, even when you fail, God will use you as He used them.,
On August 11, 1979, after a week of extraordinary monsoon rains in the Indian state of Gujarat, the two mile-long Machhu Dam-II disintegrated. The waters released from the dam’s massive reservoir rushed through the heavily populated downstream area, devastating the industrial city of Morbi and its surrounding agricultural villages. As the torrent’s thirty-foot-tall leading edge cut its way through the Machhu River valley, massive bridges gave way, factories crumbled, and thousands of houses collapsed. While no firm figure has ever been set on the disaster’s final death count, estimates in the flood’s wake ran as high as 25,000. Despite the enormous scale of the devastation, few people today have ever heard of this terrible event. This book tells, for the first time, the suspenseful and multifaceted story of the Machhu dam disaster. Based on over 130 interviews and extensive archival research, the authors recount the disaster and its aftermath in vivid firsthand detail. The book presents important findings culled from formerly classified government documents that reveal the long-hidden failures that culminated in one of the deadliest floods in history. The authors follow characters whose lives were interrupted and forever altered by the flood; provide vivid first-hand descriptions of the disaster and its aftermath; and shed light on the never-completed judicial investigation into the dam’s collapse.
