The Genius of Language
Subtitle: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: July 27, 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780375422386
First sentence: The original idea for The Genius of Language was given to me by an editor, Alice van Straalen.
Description: A collection of fifteen original essays in which writers reflect on their original languages, the mother tongues that shaped the English they write as well as the people they have become. (jacket flap copy)
Table of contents: title: Intrduction, Wendy Lesser, 3; title: The Way Back (Bangla), Bharati Mukherjee, 11; title: Yes and No (Chinese), Amy Tan, 25; title: Trouble with Language (Czech), Josef Skvorecky, 35; title: Circus Biped (Dutch), Bert Keizer, 49; title: French Without Tears (French), Luc Sante, 67; title: Prelude (German), Thomas Laqueur, 85; title: Recovering the Original (Gikyuy), Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 102; title: Split Self (Greek), Nicholas Papandreou, 111; title: Limpid, Blue, Poppy (Italian), M. J. Fitzgerald, 127; title: Personal and Singular (Korean), Ha-yun Jung, 145; title: On Being and Orphaned Writer (Polish), Louis Begley, 161; title: The Mother Tongue Between Two Slices of Rye (Russian), Gary Shteyngart, 176; title: Boswell and Mrs. Miller (Scots), James Campbell, 193; title: Fottnotes to a Double Life (Spanish), Ariel Dorfman, 206; title: My Yiddish (Yiddish), Leonard Michaels, 218; title: About the Contributors, 237