ROOM VII

Most books use language to show you a world. These make language the world. Strange Tongues gathers literature where the words themselves have gone strange — invented, braided, broken open, or reclaimed from those who tried to erase them. A backlands Portuguese half-spoken, half-sung. A novel you read by leaping between its chapters. Spanish and English knotted into a single defiant voice. Here the sentence is not a window but a country, with its own grammar and weather. You do not look through these books; you learn to speak them. Enter ready to be a foreigner — and to find, by the end, that the strange tongue was a language you already knew.