A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 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 by seeking to redefine love, sex, and gender roles in their lives, and when a businessman opens a shop and befriends Hagos, they cast off those pressures and make an unconventional choice. With this cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia details the textures and rhythms of everyday life in a refugee camp, and questions what it means to be an individual when one has lost all that makes a home or a future. Intimate and subversive, Silence Is My Mother Tongue dissects the ways society wages war on women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.

"The importance of the spoken and written word in Christian culture cannot be overestimated. In this English grammar guide, Nancy Wilson surveys the major concepts in English grammar for beginners at the late elementary and junior high level, or even adults seeking a brush-up. Our Mother Tongue dishes up examples and exercises that go beyond the stereotypical, contrived sentences serving merely to illustrate a point, and relies on selections from Scripture and great English literature to instruct students with regard to content, style, and structure."--

“The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime reading experiences that you cherish forever. It inspired me as a writer and still remains hugely inspirational.” —Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians Amy Tan’s beloved, New York Times bestselling tale of mothers and daughters, now the focus of a new documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir on Netflix Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

Mary Higgins Clark, Amy Tan, Joyce Carol Oates and Maya Angelou are among the gifted writers who share their personal reflections on mother in this exceptiolnal collection of fiction, essays and poetry. From a woman's choice to become a mother to the inner workings of a mother's relationship with her children, the full cycle of motherhood is brought to life in these touching works.

I don't know fo sho coss I will be commin by the bus... Author Cynthia (Toni) Ligon's mother, Luzetta, always had a very unique way of speaking. For Luzetta, who was raised in the South during the Great Depression, this was a language steeped in tradition, history, family, and community. While Ligon knew that her mother's grammar, syntax, and style were special, she didn't fully understand the dialect's rich context until she started studying linguistics and cultural anthropology as a college student. It was then that she realized that Luzetta's dialect was preserving a way of life long forgotten. It was emblematic of a certain time, place, and people. Now, in My Mother's Tongue: Luzetta, Ligon celebrates her mother's language and its place in her own life. The study combines personal history with contextual information to create a stirring ode to one woman's voice. Ligon infuses her work with warmth and love for her mother and the lessons she taught her. Luzetta, now eighty-five and still thriving, also has lessons to teach you about language, dialect, and cultural memory.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MINNESOTA BOOK AWARDS 2006. Poems in The Mother’s Tongue move in images of the living world that include plants and creatures both native and non-native to American landscapes. These poems move via persona and personal lyric through expressions of ambivalence about choosing the life of the body – of womanhood and motherhood – through the strange realm of pregnancy into the netherworld of the post-partum period and out into the world again, into the enlarged world, the world at war, the world of work and words. Finally these poems move to enter the world of women as transformed within the love of language – of recovered Ojibwe language and English renewed as first language in the mouths of infants. These are poems that urge women to discover the power of their own tongues as they teach speech – the sweet, salty, sour and bitter desires – the taste on the mother’s tongue.

“You will devour these beautifully written—and very important—tales of honesty, pain, and resilience” (Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and City of Girls) from fifteen brilliant writers who explore how what we don’t talk about with our mothers affects us, for better or for worse. As an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started writing an essay about being abused by her stepfather. It took her more than a decade to realize that she was actually trying to write about how this affected her relationship with her mother. When it was finally published, the essay went viral, shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. This gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers a candid look at our relationships with our mothers. Leslie Jamison writes about trying to discover who her seemingly perfect mother was before ever becoming a mom. In Cathi Hanauer’s hilarious piece, she finally gets a chance to have a conversation with her mother that isn’t interrupted by her domineering (but lovable) father. André Aciman writes about what it was like to have a deaf mother. Melissa Febos uses mythology as a lens to look at her close-knit relationship with her psychotherapist mother. And Julianna Baggott talks about having a mom who tells her everything. As Filgate writes, “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.” There’s relief in acknowledging how what we couldn’t say for so long is a way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most important, with ourselves. Contributions by Cathi Hanauer, Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Dylan Landis, Bernice L. McFadden, Julianna Baggott, Lynn Steger Strong, Kiese Laymon, Carmen Maria Machado, André Aciman, Sari Botton, Nayomi Munaweera, Brandon Taylor, and Leslie Jamison.

The story to be written -- Missing -- At Hobby Lobby -- Dear María -- Voice activation -- Heritage speaker -- My body's production -- Offering -- Purity & danger: a performance -- This is not the end of my film career -- The 11th day of Occupy Wall Street -- Natural disaster: a dream -- Mother, monster: a lecture -- Questionnaire -- Projection -- Trace of lovers -- Paramour -- Getting around the subject -- Dear stranger -- Pedagogy: a dream -- Training -- Visitors log -- Archaeology of vestments -- Mise en garde -- Voice: an essay -- Ghost song.

The Kitchen Table Translation issue of Aster(ix) explores the connections between translation (the movement of texts) and migration (the movement of bodies). It features immigrant and diasporic translators, and brings together personal, cultural, and political dimensions of translation with the literary and aesthetic aspects of the work.

This volume highlights the role of language ideologies in the process of negotiation of identities and shows that in different historical and social contexts different identities may be negotiable or non-negotiable.