Robert Radin Libros

“Robert Radin’s Teaching English to Refugees does it all, weaving together memoir, philosophy of language, social-justice advocacy, and graphic narrative into a haunting meditation on what can happen when the least powerful among us escape oppression and seek refuge in the United States. With the unerring precision of both linguist and poet, Radin tells a story of teaching English to refugees from such troubled areas of the world as Iraq, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As he struggles to find ways to reach across languages and cultures, a quieter story plays out — his own, where multi-generational Jewish legacies get compressed into incisive and singular moments of prose you won’t soon forget. Through it all, the voices of his Muslim students — haltingly at first, and then with increasing confidence — carve out a space for being all their own. This spare, unsparing, and intrepid book takes a close, unwavering look at some of the hardest stories of our times until nothing is what it seems at first and students become teachers to us all.”―Katharine Haake, author of The Time of Quarantine and That Water, Those Rocks

In Noche Triste ("Sad Night"), Robert Radin explores his struggles with anorexia in the 1980s. He also examines the history of self-starvation -- its roots in rituals of religious purification, its development into an entertainment craze, its use as a tool of resistance -- and, in the process, forces us to reconsider what it means to have anorexia. As his starving becomes an increasingly political act and he ventures to Mexico, alone, alienated from loved ones, we realize he's in the grip of something dangerous that neither he, nor we, fully understand. Written in exquisite prose, Noche Triste is a devastating, revelatory chronicle of a complex illness.