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Chattering
Set all over the globe from London to L. A., Brazil to the Caribbean, this extraordinary debut collection of stories reveals how the world looks when you're young, hip, wild, and deaf Louise Stern's stories are peopled with brave young girls out to party, travel the world, and go a little bit wild. The one thing that marks them out from their peers is that they have grown up deaf. They communicate with the outside world via a complicated mixture of sign language, lip-reading, note-scribbling, guesswork, and instinct; yet they are full of daring, ready for adventures that take them into unfamiliar places and strange, cockeyed relationships with people whose actions they observe but never wholly understand. It is this sense of dislocation from common experience that marks out Stern's original voice. She is fully engaged in the world most readers will recognize and share, but the way she observes it sets her apart—these vivid tales are all startlingly new.
162 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2011
12 people want to read
About the author
Louise Stern
9 books9 followersLouise Stern (born 1978) is an American writer and artist, and works around ideas of language, communication and isolation.
Stern grew up in an exclusively deaf community and is fourth-generation deaf on her father's side, and third-generation deaf on her mother's side. She attended California School for the Deaf, Fremont.
Stern studied at Gallaudet University, where she was the only student studying art. She moved to the United Kingdom in 2002 where she gained an MA from Sotheby's Institute of Art. She works as an assistant to artist Sam Taylor-Wood.
Her own artwork has been exhibited in galleries in Geneva, Barcelona, Madrid, London and Port Eliot. She is the founder and publisher of Maurice, a contemporary art magazine for children.
Her first collection of short stories, Chattering, was published by Granta in 2011. Alan Warner called it "an amazing debut: vibrantly perceptive, gentle, funny and profound".
Her first novel, Ismael and His Sisters, was written in, and is set in, a deaf village in the Yucatán Peninsula, where Stern communicated in Mayan Sign Language. There will be an accompanying book of photographs to it.
She has also written plays, including The Ugly Birds and The Interpreter, which was performed at the Bush Theatre. Stern was commissioned to write stories for BBC Radio 4 in 2012 and 2013.
Stern grew up in an exclusively deaf community and is fourth-generation deaf on her father's side, and third-generation deaf on her mother's side. She attended California School for the Deaf, Fremont.
Stern studied at Gallaudet University, where she was the only student studying art. She moved to the United Kingdom in 2002 where she gained an MA from Sotheby's Institute of Art. She works as an assistant to artist Sam Taylor-Wood.
Her own artwork has been exhibited in galleries in Geneva, Barcelona, Madrid, London and Port Eliot. She is the founder and publisher of Maurice, a contemporary art magazine for children.
Her first collection of short stories, Chattering, was published by Granta in 2011. Alan Warner called it "an amazing debut: vibrantly perceptive, gentle, funny and profound".
Her first novel, Ismael and His Sisters, was written in, and is set in, a deaf village in the Yucatán Peninsula, where Stern communicated in Mayan Sign Language. There will be an accompanying book of photographs to it.
She has also written plays, including The Ugly Birds and The Interpreter, which was performed at the Bush Theatre. Stern was commissioned to write stories for BBC Radio 4 in 2012 and 2013.
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