The Autobiography of a Language: Essays and Stories

A new hybrid collection of poetic essays and stories by New York-based Mirene Arsanios, originally from Beirut. A "almost hallucinatory, heart-rending loss of the familiar" says Mónica de la Torre. Iman Mersal notes that Arsanios "formulates a new mother language despite the absence of a mother tongue, one capable of both love and cruelty." Mirene Arsanios’s finely sculpted prose is fiercely situated. With devastating candor, it draws us into a thinking process that lays bare some crucial articulations of the present: the transactional nature of care, the relation between language and sex, the space between mourning and giving birth, what class does to the body, and what grammar is unable to accommodate. Between remembrance and dreamwork, every passage brims with exhilarating detail. This is some heady, magical materialism.