Christopher Barzak

Category: Language

  • Listening to The Language of Moths

    Hey, cool, I hadn’t seen that this was available until today, but here is an audiobook version of my Nebula nominated novelette, The Language of Moths.  I love the image they gave the story, and even better: if you go through the link above to the audible.com page for the book, you can hear the…

  • Wabi-Sabi

    A friend wrote today to say, “I read your new book finally.  It’s very wabi-sabi.”  And more, of course.  But if she’d said nothing else but that it was very wabi-sabi, I would have been elated.  It’s the descriptor that I feel captures The Love We Share Without Knowing, and in a more American way,…

  • Finding voices

    One of the things I love about the internet is being able to access so many interviews, speeches, debates, lectures and articles by so many authors, artists and thinkers around the globe.  When I recall life pre-internet, and how these items seemed further away and took more time and energy to seek out and find…

  • Revision

    Thanks to the very sweet Vonday McIntyre and Diane Turnshek, the mini-essay I wrote for the Nebulas on “The Language of Moths” has been replaced with the final version I’d settled on after revision help from Jackie M, who has the most incredible pink hair (saw her at Wiscon this weekend and had a good chat by the elevators about…

  • The Language of “The Language of Moths”

    I’ve been asked to write a short essay on “The Language of Moths” for the Nebula Awards, which has placed me in the awkward position of talking about one of my own stories, which I don’t usually do, or like to do, for various reasons.  This is my first stab at it, though.  *Revised with…

  • Kant on peace

    Lately I’ve doing some translation work for a Japanese publisher that is making a bilingual book on peace for teens, using Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and theory of how peace is established and maintained.  So I’ve been reading Kant in English and Japanese to do this. I’d read a little of Kant previously but not enough, so it’s…

  • What is language?

    Via Cory Doctorow at Boingboing, a non-verbal autistic woman presents us with a video at Youtube, in which she speaks her own language, using gestures and sounds we don’t readily recognize as language, and visual cues that aren’t recognized as “normal” communicative cues either.  She then translates the first two sections with the aid of a text-to-speech…