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Compassing the Truth: Language in the Historical Novel
Writing a novel set in 17th Century London, I wrestle regularly with understanding my characters’ world. Have I done a good enough job comprehending their relationship to time? To daylight and...
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The Elements of Style
On the first day of class, my ninth grade biology teacher told us the curriculum called for us to learn science from the least abstract level to the most—biology this year, followed by chemistry,...
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Riding In Cars With Words
Photo by tofuart On long car rides with my father, you could count on hearing three questions: What kind of cow is that? What kind of roof is that? Is the moon waxing or waning? My answers were always...
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The Ploughshares Round-Down: The Calvary Film and the Purpose of Art
“[T]he barrier between one’s self and one’s knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things we would rather not know! – James Baldwin John Michael McDonagh’s film Calvary begins with...
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How to Write Indian Literature
If you’re studying a nation’s literature, it’s best to know that nation’s language. English literature finds definition in its mother tongue, despite the linguistic leap from Shakespeare to Zadie...
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Laughs in Translation
Recently, I was reading The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s antic retelling of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilot. The novel follows—in part—the devil and his deranged retinue, including a...
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Language Could Kill You: Adichie, Code-Switching & the Biafran War
Language plays a crucial role throughout Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels, but nowhere is it more decisive than in the author’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Written against the backdrop of the...
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A Gathering of Particulars: On Building a Word-Hoard
It is fitting that the bowerbird roosts in the opening lines of Ted Hughes’s poem “A Literary Life,” for there is perhaps no better mascot for reader and writer both. The species is a known collector,...
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The Right Words
For my daughter, who just turned two, language is plastic. She pokes it and stretches it to find out what it can do. Joyfully, she tells stories (only some of them true) about her day. She loves to...
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Circumflexes and censorship: on the French spelling reform
Photo by Alan Levine Behold: a diacritic has got an entire country in an uproar. And of course that country is France. Let’s rewind a bit: in 1990, the Académie Française, prestigious gatekeeper of all...
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How One Publisher Sparked a Rebirth of Turkey’s Greek History
Greek women and girls of Trabzon pose for a studio photograph, c. early 1900s On the flight back to Istanbul, I hold one of the first books put out by Istos Publishing in my hands. Out of the press’s...
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Living Between Languages: Notes on Language and Loss
I was seventeen years old when I started working at the front desk of a beach resort in my coastal city in Brazil and began to teach myself my first sentences in English. In the tourism industry,...
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Writing in a Non-Native Language: Choosing Whom to Love
Image courtesy of FreeImages.com/Mohammad Jobaed Adnan During my adolescence, I fell in love with a language before I fell in love with a human being. In high school, in India, a former colony of the...
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Carefully Chosen Words: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Vladimir Nabokov
One of my favorite little known facts about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is that she was a student in Vladimir Nabokov’s European Literature class at Cornell when she was an undergraduate...
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The Unbearable Rancidity of French Letters
Is it time for us to be done with the French Academy? A while back, I wrote about the heated debate over gender-neutral writing in French, a subject which has gotten writers, editors, and academics all...
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How to Write Indian Literature
If you’re studying a nation’s literature, it’s best to know that nation’s language. English literature finds definition in its mother tongue, despite the linguistic leap from Shakespeare to Zadie...
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