From the international bestselling author of The Disappeared comes a profound meditation on the cultural impact of storytelling and testimony in five intimate and illuminating essays.
In this moving collection, critically acclaimed novelist Kim Echlin examines how we turn to literature to measure our lives against the darknesses of our time. Tell Others explores how literature resists silencing and repression with truth and imagination.
Echlin skillfully blends her lived experience in different parts of the world—teaching in post-revolutionary China, researching war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, studying under one of Canada’s most respected Elders, Basil H. Johnston—with wide-ranging reading that offers solace and highlights the possibility to transform outrage into understanding and resistance.
Looking to her favourite writers—Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Ma Jian, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Haruki Murakami, to name a few—Echlin grapples in fresh ways with tyranny, war, sexual violence, and censorship to bear witness to the past and look to the future. Written in characteristically unsparing and evocative prose, Tell Others is an invitation to all readers to acknowledge histories that are difficult to see and to make meaning from the stories that buried bones tell.
A portion of the author proceeds for this book will be donated to PEN Canada and PEN International.