Play Audiobook Sample
The Magical Language of Others: A Memoir Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(0.00) - 0 listener ratings
Quick Stats About this Audiobook
Total Audiobook Chapters:
Longest Chapter Length:
Shortest Chapter Length:
Average Chapter Length:
Audiobooks by this Author:
Publisher Description
A tale of deep bonds to family, place, language―of hard-won selfhood told by a singular, incandescent voice.
After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji’s parents return to Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in the family’s new California home. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself in a world made strange in her mother’s absence. Her mother writes letters over the years seeking forgiveness and love―letters Eun Ji cannot understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.
The letters lay bare the impact of her mother’s departure, as Eun Ji gets to know the woman who raised her and left her behind. Eun Ji is a student, a traveler, a dancer, a poet, and a daughter coming to terms not only with her parents’ prolonged absence, but her family’s history: her grandmother’s Jun’s years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the horrors her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre. Where, Koh asks, do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words―in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language―to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love?
The Magical Language of Others is a fearless and poetic mind grappling with forgiveness, reconciliation, legacy, and intergenerational trauma―conjuring an epic saga and love story between mothers and daughters spanning four generations.
Download and start listening now!
“An exquisite, challenging, and stunning memoir. E. J. Koh intricately melds her personal story with a broader view of Korean history. Through these pages, you are asked to experience one family’s heartbreak, trauma, and complex love for each other. This memoir will pierce you.”
— Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me
Quotes
-
“A haunting, gorgeous narrative…lushly told.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune -
“[A] stunning memoir.”
— Chicago Review of Books -
“A tremendous gift…from a tremendously talented writer.”
— San Francisco Chronicle -
“Koh’s narration of this lyrical dance of language and emotion is haunting and deeply moving.”
— AudioFile -
“Floats stunningly through the abandonment she experienced as a teenager…[and] talks about living while excavating the troubled past and writing difficult love letters.”
— Electric Literature -
“A masterpiece, a love letter to mothers and daughters everywhere.”
— Shelf Awareness -
“A finely wrought, linguistically rich, provocative memoir.”
— Booklist -
“A poignant transgenerational story of trauma and recovery in South Korea, Japan, and America.”
— Library Journal -
“Intimate, subtle insights about a unique mother-daughter relationship.”
— Kirkus Reviews -
“A beautifully crafted saga…graceful and moving.”
— Nicole Chung, author of All You Can Ever Know -
“A densely layered, lyrical exploration of the bonds between generations of daughters and mothers.”
— Jeannie Vanasco, author of Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl -
“Give yourself over to her narrative territory and the resetting of the borders of lineage, language, and lives lost.”
— Shawn Wong, author of Homebase and American Knees -
“Koh remarkably and beautifully translates the language of mothers as the language of survivors.”
— Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War
Awards
-
A Literary Hub Pick of Best Memoirs to Keep You Company in Isolation
-
A BookPage Top Pick of Can't-Miss Reads from Indie Publishers
-
Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award
-
An Amazon Editor’s Top Pick of Biographies & Memoirs
The Magical Language of Others Listener Reviews
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
About E. J. Koh
E. J. Koh is the author of poetry collection A Lesser Love, winner of the Pleiades Editors Prize (Louisiana State U. Press, 2017). Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others. She is the recipient of the MacDowell Colony and Kundiman fellowships and the 2017 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship, and was a runner-up for the 2018 Prairie Schooner Summer Nonfiction Prize.