Chattering: Stories

Louise Stern”s stories are peopled with brave young girls out to party, travel the world, and go a little bit wild. The one thing that marks them out from their peers is that they have grown up deaf. They communicate with the outside world via a complicated mixture of sign language, lip-reading, note-scribbling, guesswork, and instinct; yet they are full of daring, ready for adventures that take them into unfamiliar places and strange, cockeyed relationships with people whose actions they observe but never wholly understand. It is this sense of dislocation from common experience that marks out Stern”s original voice. She is fully engaged in the world most readers will recognize and share, but the way she observes it sets her apart?these vivid tales are all startlingly new.