Writer Jhumpa Lahiri grew up speaking Bengali and later English, then became passionately devoted to a third language, Italian. Her book In Other Words: A Memoir (Bookshop|Amazon) is a love letter to Italian and a vivid account of the challenges and...
A Louisiana listener shares a favorite passage from Laurie Lee’s memoir Cider with Rosie (Bookshop|Amazon), about his boyhood in post-World-War II England. An extract is here and contains the passage:“For the first time in my life I was out of the...
Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks (Bookshop|Amazon) is about the foodways and folkways passed down through five generations of a Black Appalachian family. The book, by novelist and...
In his delightful memoir Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World (Bookshop|Amazon), Christian Cooper introduces the vocabulary of birding, including the term warbler neck, an affliction among fellow birders. Cooper...
German filmmaker Werner Herzog is known for such documentaries as Grizzly Man and Fitzcarraldo. He’s also fascinated with what he calls “the limits of language,” as evident in his 1976 documentary how fast auctioneers can talk, How Much Wood Would a...
In her sumptuous new memoir, Jamaican writer Safiya Sinclair describes her escape from a difficult childhood ruled by her tyrannical father. For Sinclair, poetry became a lifeline. Plus: that fizzy chocolate drink called an egg cream contains...
