Narrator as Interpreter

Narrator as Interpreter
Author: Saʼidu ʻBabura Ahmad
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2002
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Based on a corpus of 150 tales from the many towns and villages in the main Hausa states of Northern Nigeria. The author examines the stability of the form of the tales and variations in relation to narrative freedom and constraints, narrative performance techniques, the use of song, specialised vocabulary and audience enjoyment. He identifies the major themes and moral categories of the tales, and plot structure. The tales are shown to be a potent medium of preserving and transmitting traditional values, and a dynamic contemporary art form, despite the presence of alternative means of communication, and other cultural presences in Northern Nigeria. They are discussed in English translation in the main body of the work, and the original language versions are fully transcribed in the appendices.

Interpreter of Maladies

Interpreter of Maladies
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 202
Release: 1999
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 039592720X

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and a baffling new world, the characters in Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.

The Interpreter

The Interpreter
Author: Diego Marani
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1910213195

'The Interpreter isn't merely the sequel to New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs: it is a singular and deeply felt thesis, a warped manifesto of sorts, derived from a career spent immersed in languages. For Marani is up to his old tricks. Like in its predecessors, the novel comes dripping in satire, but this time of a more avowedly self reflexive nature... A primordial, universal language is the trick, and it is this which, and it is this with which Marani's interpreter, the shape-shifter at the heart of this masked ball of a novel, purports to have 'infected' Felix. His 'incomprehensible blather' might in fact be 'the ancient language of Eden, the one in which the serpent spoke to Adam'. Marani's ideas are typically far-reaching and provocative.' Thea Lenarduzzi in The Times Literary Supplement 'This is more of a romp than the other two novels, more comedic, albeit a very dark kind of comedy; part investigation into the properties of language, part thriller. The only lead Bellamy has is a list of seemingly random cities: Vancouver, San Diego, Papeete, Vladivostok, Odessa ... At one point he is sent to a sinister therapeutic institution, where patients are taught languages unknown to them in order to address their problems (Bellamy is assigned Romanian. Each language has its own therapeutic effect, but “English is the language of cowards and queers,” says an inmate angrily at one point, which is certainly a new way of looking at it). When we find out what links the list of cities together we realise that we have, in a most enjoyable way, been subject to a kind of superior shaggy dog story. Marani understands the appeal of the idea of the primordial language, but knows well enough that it is a Snark, a chimera, which is why the novel ends the way it does, why it is deliberately not as haunting as Grammar and Vostyachs, and also why Marani says this is the last time he’ll address the subject in fiction. It is excellently translated by Judith Landry, who I hope is not suffering like Marani’s characters.' Nick Lezard's Choice in The Guardian

Practicing Oral History with Immigrant Narrators

Practicing Oral History with Immigrant Narrators
Author: Carol McKirdy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2016-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1315422158

In addition to the problem of language, conducting oral histories with immigrant narrators often requires special considerations: past violence, cultural sensitivity, and lack of trust. Yet, these narrators are often witnesses to, or participants in, important historical events, or can describe otherwise-undocumented social phenomena. The first book to focus specifically on oral history practices with immigrant narrators, it -gives both the novice and experienced oral historian insights into their narrators’ needs;-provides the tools to effectively plan and execute an oral history project in an immigrant community;-includes case studies, additional resources, and templates of important oral history processes.

Intimacies

Intimacies
Author: Katie Kitamura
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2022-07-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0399576177

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2021 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE 2021 READS AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER A BEST BOOK OF 2021 FROM Washington Post, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic, Kirkus and Entertainment Weekly “Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller…. Katie Kitamura is a wonder.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward and Eat the Document “One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021.” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times A novel from the author of A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths. An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home. She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes. A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.

Lie With Me

Lie With Me
Author: Philippe Besson
Publisher: Scribner
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1501197886

“I remember the movement of his hips pressing against the pinball machine. This one sentence had me in its grip until the end. Two young men find each other, always fearing that life itself might be the villain standing in their way. A stunning and heart-gripping tale.” —André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice The critically acclaimed, internationally beloved novel by Philippe Besson—“this year’s Call Me By Your Name” (Vulture) with raves in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Vanity Fair, Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Out—about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress and writer Molly Ringwald. In this “sexy, pure, and radiant story” (Out), Philippe chances upon a young man outside a hotel in Bordeaux who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Thomas is the son of a farmer; Philippe the son of a school principal. At school, they don’t acknowledge each other. But they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair. Despite the intensity of their attraction, from the beginning Thomas knows how it will end: “Because you will leave and we will stay,” he says. Philippe becomes a writer and travels the world, though as this “tender, sensuous novel” (The New York Times Book Review) shows, he never lets go of the relationship that shaped him, and every story he’s ever told. “Beautifully translated by Ringwald” (NPR), this is “Philippe Besson’s book of a lifetime...an elegiac tale of first, hidden love” (The New Yorker).

The Interpreter

The Interpreter
Author: Suki Kim
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429923784

A striking first novel about the dark side of the American Dream Suzy Park is a twenty-nine-year-old Korean American interpreter for the New York City court system. Young, attractive, and achingly alone, she makes a startling and ominous discovery during one court case that forever alters her family's history. Five years prior, her parents--hardworking greengrocers who forfeited personal happiness for their children's gain--were brutally murdered in an apparent robbery of their fruit and vegetable stand. Or so Suzy believed. But the glint of a new lead entices Suzy into the dangerous Korean underworld, and ultimately reveals the mystery of her parents' homicide. An auspicious debut about the myth of the model Asian citizen, The Interpreter traverses the distance between old worlds and new, poverty and privilege, language and understanding.

Here in Berlin

Here in Berlin
Author: Cristina Garcia
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2017-10-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1619029707

Long–listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence * A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice "Here in Berlin is one of the most interesting new works of fiction I've read . . . The voices are remarkably distinct, and even with their linguistic mannerisms . . . mark them out as separate people . . . [This novel] is simply very, very good." —The New York Times Book Review Here in Berlin is a portrait of a city through snapshots, an excavation of the stories and ghosts of contemporary Berlin—its complex, troubled past still pulsing in the air as it was during World War II. Critically acclaimed novelist Cristina García brings the people of this famed city to life, their stories bristling with regret, desire, and longing. An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character—vibrant and postapocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. Here in Berlin she encounters a people's history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine only to return home to a family who doesn’t believe him; the young Jewish scholar hidden in a sarcophagus until safe passage to England is found; the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed–out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes; a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them; and the son of a zookeeper at the Berlin Zoo, fighting to keep the animals safe from both war and an increasingly starving populace. A meditation on war and mystery, this an exciting new work by one of our most gifted novelists, one that seeks to align the stories of the past with the stories of the future. "Garcia’s new novel is ingeniously structured, veering from poignant to shocking . . . Here in Berlin has echoes of W.G. Sebald, but its vivid, surprising images of wartime Berlin are Garcia’s own." —BBC Culture, 1 of the 10 Best Books of 2017

Whereabouts

Whereabouts
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2021-04-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593318323

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies about a woman questioning her place in the world, wavering between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. “Another masterstroke in a career already filled with them.” —O, the Oprah Magazine Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her life’s journey, realizes that she’s lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone. We follow her to the pool she frequents, and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husband’s untimely death. Among those who appear on this woman’s path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change. This is the first novel Lahiri has written in Italian and translated into English. The reader will find the qualities that make Lahiri’s work so beloved: deep intelligence and feeling, richly textured physical and emotional landscapes, and a poetics of dislocation. But Whereabouts, brimming with the impulse to cross barriers, also signals a bold shift of style and sensibility. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.

Handbook of Research on Narrative Interactions

Handbook of Research on Narrative Interactions
Author: Yilmaz, Recep
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2021-01-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 179984904X

Our understanding of the concept of narrative has undergone a significant transformation over time, particularly today as new communication technologies are developed and popularized. As new narrative genres are born and old ones undergo great change by the minute, a thorough understanding can shed light on which storytelling elements work best in what format. That deep understanding can then help build strong, satisfying stories. The Handbook of Research on Narrative Interactions is an essential publication that examines the relationships between types of narratives in a shifting and widening scope of storytelling forms. While highlighting a wide range of topics including contemporary culture, advertising, and transmedia storytelling, this book is ideally designed for media professionals, content creators, advertisers, entrepreneurs, researchers, academicians, and students.