In this moving collection, critically acclaimed novelist Kim Echlin examines how writers and readers have turned to literature to remember and reimagine the unspeakable darknesses of our time. Tell Others illustrates the power of testimony in literature--fiction based on true and often devastating events or non-fiction derived from real testimonial transcripts--to explore how we engage with our world and imagine new possibilities through writing and reading. From Salman Rushdie's exuberant The Satanic Verses to Ma Jian's searing Beijing Coma, we see how literature is used to resist. Echlin's personal experiences teaching in China and studying Indigenous culture under the great Basil H. Johnston show us the redemptive power of translingual storytelling on the international literary stage. Looking to her favourite writers around the world--Milan Kundera, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Haruki Murakami, to name a few--Echlin grapples in fresh ways with tyranny, war, sexual violence, and censorship to bear witness to the past and look to the future. Written in characteristically unsparing and evocative prose, Tell Others is an invitation to all readers to acknowledge histories that are difficult to see and to make meaning from the stories that buried bones tell.
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