Forgetting English

Midge Raymond stretches the boundaries of place as she explores the indelible imprint of home upon the self and the ways in which new frontiers both defy and confirm who we are. The women who inhabit these stories travel fro business or for pleasure, sometimes out of duty and sometimes in search of freedom, and each encounters the unexpected. From a biologist navigating the stark, icy moonscape of Antarctica to a business woman seeking refuge in the lonely islands of the South Pacific, the characters in these stories abandon their native landscapes—only to find that, once separated from the ordinary, they must confront new interpretations of who they really are, and who they're meant to be.

Midge Raymond

Midge Raymond's award-winning stories have appeared in the American Literary Review, the Indiana Review, the Ontario Review, the Bellevue Literary Review, The North American Review, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She currently lives in Seattle along with her husband and a fat orange cat. Visit her Web site at www.ForgettingEnglish.com.

Reviews

When you forget English, you might learn to speak the forbidden language of your sister's Tongan lover—you might find you understand the sweet murmur of the gentoo and the ecstatic cry of emperor penguins. When the man you saved from the sea chooses the icy water a second time, you may bend to the universal posture of grief, recognizing the way your body echoes a bird's in a wild communion of sorrow. Midge Raymond's stories are a revelation and a delight, a journey from the frozen desert at the bottom of the world to the lush rainforest of Hawai'i. Prepare yourself to think in Chinese, to start over, to reveal your worst crime and discover you are a stranger to yourself, born again into a world where all things become wondrous and new, terrifying and possible.

—Melanie Rae Thon, author Sweet Hearts

Midge Raymond's exquisitely written stories turn on relationships, and not just of a particular kind—between lovers, yes but also within families, between sisters, among friends, or forged in chance encounters with strangers—and the turning often occurs in moments when the utterly mundane has abruptly conjured itself into crisis. The anchor of Raymond's outlook may be North American, but the stories mainly happen in far-flung places—Taipei, Hawai'i, the Serengeti, Antarctica, the Kingdom of Tonga. Raymond's eye for telling detail is very fine, as one expects of an accomplished writer, but to this she adds the informing eye of a natural historian of place. The locales function as scrims against which the characters act, or into which they dissolve in a gradual process of "forgetting," of sloughing off skins to reveal human essentials.

—John Keeble, author of Nocturnal America

Ordering Information

To purchase Forgetting English by Midge Raymond, please contact our distributor, University Press of New England toll free at 1-800-421-1561 or by fax at 1-603-448-9729. The book is also available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine retailers.

To request a copy for review, please contact the Carnegie Mellon University Press Editorial Offices at (412) 268-2861 or by email at CarnegieMellonUniversityPress@gmail.com.