Showing results for "mother-tongue" in Literature & Fiction

Brynn is a claustrophobic suburban mother on the brink . . .Eric, her husband, is transforming in dark and dangerous ways . . .Their daughter, Jenny, can't fathom the storm coming her way . . .

After getting his Master's degree in the US, and because he can't get a job, and because all he wants to do all day is sit at his Play Station, Enrique Márquez Pino, a middleclass Bogotan, is forced to return to his home country, where he is to live with his father. Enrique believes that nothing is unattainable for a young, smart and hard-working Colombian (poor idiot). Nothing gets too nice for him in Bogotá, but at least he gets the chance to portray his countrymen and women.

In this playful and daring interrogation of language, the globally acclaimed Yoko Tawada reveals the poetics, politics and potential of existing outside one's mother tongue. From Senegalese writers discarding colonial-enforced French to the increasing use of loan words in her native Japanese, Tawada deconstructs the ways in which the world shapes and is shaped by languages: their hidden systems of power, their sweeping histories and, ultimately, the people who claim, reject, adapt or romanticise them.

On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations....

Con el sigilo de un ladrón que entra a una casa por la noche mientras todos duermen, el escritor traiciona a sus semejantes pero es también un centinela que vela su sueño. Desde el primero de los ochenta y cuatro breves textos que conforman este libro, los temas de la traición y de la vocación son los ejes a través de los cual es el autor busca el episodio decisivo que determinó su destino de escritor.