KGB Bar

Katherine Russell Rich is the author of DREAMING IN HINDI.  Having miraculously survived a serious illness and at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor, Rich spontaneously accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language. Before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. Rich documents her experiences in India ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating, using Hindi as the lens through which she sees not only India, but the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. Seamlessly combining Rich’s courageous (and often hilarious) personal journey with wideranging reporting, Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-opening account of what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.

Stephen Elliott’s THE ADDERALL DIARIES was published last fall to rave reviews everywhere from Vanity Fair to the LA Times to Time Out New York.  The story of a computer programmer’s suspected murder of his Russian wife, it’s also a memoir of Elliott’s various addictions, his abusive childhood in Chicago, his abusive (in a different way) life in San Francisco, questions he has about his father, and good old writers block.  An intensely personal memoir, it is also a work of reportage and true crime.  Genres bend, memory deceives, stories change, and Elliot writes it all with razor-sharp prose and unflinching emotional acuity.