as our new release of the week: The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues. Edited by Wendy Lesser (Pantheon). The Bharati Mukherjee describes how her family was driven out of her Bengal hometown by the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1946, and how the experience made the Bangla language all the more important to them, ultimately leaving its mark on her English-language storytelling style. Amy Tan tells of her frustration with simplistic cultural comparisons between English and Chinese. For Ariel Dorfman, one of the great pleasures of Spanish is its fluid sense of time. Luc Sante writes about the “silken chains of prepositional phrases” and “incantatory power” of French. For Leonard Michaels, paradox is everywhere in Yiddish and may explain the Jewish love of jokes. Berkeley author Wendy Lesser, founder of The ThreePenny Review, compiled this interesting new collection. “Intimate, entertaining and thoughtful,the essays in this volume search for ‘the sources of writing in writers,’ but elicit the experiences and emotions of bilingual authors who were asked to reflect on the differences between their first languages and English,” say the book editors at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Excerpt: “There is a reason why the language we inherit at birth is called our mother tongue,” writes Mukherjee. “It is our mother, forgiving, embracing, naming the world and all its emotions…” Read more.