EP 27:  This anthology of contemporary writing, IN THE LANGUAGE OF BARBARIANS, I WOULD TELL YOU STORIES, published on the occasion of Edgewise Press’s twentieth anniversary, brings together texts by philosophers, literary and cultural critics, poets and poet-novelists, a psychologist, and, in one instance, an artist-farmer:  Brunella Antomarini, Bruce Benderson, Ilya Bernstein, Edward Burns, Peter Carravetta, Carmen Firan, Andrew McCarron, Peter Nadin, Mary de Rachewiltz, Annie Reiner, Adrian Sângeorzan, Paolo Valesio, Robert Viscusi.  They engage, either directly or indirectly, the following loosely put questions:  What does it mean to say that we must become human if we are, at some level or in some way, already human?  Does it mean becoming more human because we were or are somehow less human – or worse, because we can become, at any given moment in time, in history, inhuman?  Speaking in this most counter-intuitive and seemingly contradictory manner, the question becomes:  why is it necessary to speak in a barbaric language in order to become more human?  Why has telling a story in itself become inherently a form of barbarism in our postmodern era?  Has this process of dishumanization, running either backwards or forwards (in the case of technology, for example), spawned, seemingly impossibly, a private language or an all-too-collective (mythic or global) one?  Why do stories of our humanity always seem to have at their roots the still more basic story of our inhumanity, towards ourselves as well as others?  In the end, perhaps, these writers do not so much answer these questions as allow them to burgeon into texts reflecting the times in which we live.

Edited, and with an introduction, by Richard Milazzo.

First edition paperback, January 2015, 200 pp., sewn, bound and printed in Italy, with a two-color cover.

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