Elgin, Suzette Haden

Native Tongue

Called "fascinating" by the New York Times upon its first publication in 1984, Native Tongue won wide critical praise and cult status, and has often been compared to the futurist fiction of Margaret Atwood. Set in the twenty-second century, the novel tells of a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights and banned from public life. Earth's wealth depends on interplanetary commerce with alien races, and linguists --a small, clannish group of families --have become the ruling elite by controlling all interplanetary communication. Their women are used to breed perfect translators for all the galaxies' languages.

Nazareth Chornyak, the most talented linguist of the family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for trade organizations, supervising the children's language education, running the compound, and caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth comes to discover is that a slow revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them from men's control.

"Native Tongue brings to life not only the possibility of a women's language, but a rationale for one,"-Village Voice

"Elgin takes up more than linguistics, of course-everything from religion to sex…the story is absolutely compelling."-Women's Review of Books

Suzette Haden Elgin is author of twelve science fiction novels and is widely know for her best-selling series The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and for The Grandmother Principles. She is director of the Ozark Center for Language Studies and is professor emerita of linguistics at San Diego State University.

Susan Squier is Julia Brill professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

The Judas Rose: Native Tongue II (Native Tongue 2)

An instant cult classic, and groundbreaking forerunner to Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale. Native Tongue Trilogy revealed to its audiences a frightening future world where the women of Earth are once again property.

In Volume II of the trilogy, the women have at last decided to spread the language using the Roman Catholic church. But when a handful of priests discover the plot, they move to stamp it out with their own female agent, Sister Miriam Rose. But Sister Miriam has plans of her own. . . .

Earthsong: Native Tongue III (Native Tongue 3)

In Earthsong, the trilogy's long-awaited finale, the Aliens have abandoned Earth, taking their technologies with them and plunging the planet into economic and ecological disaster. Devastated, the women decide to take their failed Ladan project back underground, desperately seeking guidance from their long-dead foremothers. The women discover an ingenious solution to the problem of human violence and seek to spread their knowledge-but has their final solution come too late?

Peacetalk 101

Peacetalk 101 is the story of an ordinary man with a hard row to hoe, who decides that only desperate measures are open to him; he plans a murder-suicide, and sets his plan in motion. But then things that are not at all ordinary start happening to him, as a stranger -- a stranger who seems to be nothing more than a homeless man lazily riding the bus all day -- shows him, one small mysterious step at a time, that he has another choice. Suzette Haden Elgin, author of the best-selling Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series, as well as The Grandmother Principles and the Native Tongue trilogy, once more shares with readers her talent for combining conscience with language and ideals with story.

The Ozark Trilogy

Twelve Fair Kingdoms: 2

Yonder Comes Other: 2 (Daw Collectors Book, No 663)

Star Anchored, Star Angered: 2

Furthest (Ace)

The grand jubilee (Ozark fantasy trilogy)