Books about endangered languages tend to be laments, full of shocking statistics and portraits of impossibly frail, ancient last speakers in faraway places. Ross Perlin’s exuberant, radical book blasts that away, exploring, instead, New York, now ‘the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world’, home to more than 700 languages (of approximately
These Bodies of Water begins dramatically (as befits a book derived from Sabrina Mahfouz’s Royal Court show A History of Water in the Middle East) in a stuffy little room in Whitehall where the author is being interrogated by a man in a beige mac who is vetting her for top security clearance. It all
Medea says ‘hiiiiiiii’ on the first page of Mallory Ortberg’s hilarious book, which puts smartphones in the hands of literary heroes, heroines and their writers; ‘it’s Glauce right??’, Medea continues, squealing ‘when is the WEDDING/ I hope you guys have the Argonauts as groomsmen/ and they do the sword thing/ you know where they make
The first mermaid we meet in this intriguing, gorgeously produced book is spray-painted in scarlet on a wall in Madrid, holding a heart not a mirror. Not your average mermaid, then; but as the folklorist and playwright Sophia Kingshill delves further into their complex cultural history, it becomes clear there’s no such thing. Mermaids can
