Not Speaking

Families are places of love, care, and fun; also of anger, anxiety, and quarrels. Not Speaking tells the story of a Greek matriarch, Rena, and her English children in post-war London and the present. It begins with Rena’s move out of a flat in St John’s Wood owned by her son Nicky Clarke, and the family disagreement that erupted. Moving through the London slums of Blackfriars, Greece under Nazi occupation, the Old Kent Road, Elephant and Castle, and the world of Mayfair hairdressing, this is a tale of enrichment and fame, infidelity and its consequences. And in the end, it has a message: every family is unique and all families are the same. * 'Wonderfully evocative – funny, illuminating and moving.' Jenny Uglow

How significant relationship rifts affect people in therapy, and how therapists can help. Scratch the surface of almost any family and you will undoubtedly find a significant cutoff. Nearly everyone has someone in their lives with whom they stopped speaking for one reason or another, or someone who abruptly cut them off. Often these severed ties are forever unresolved, and the emotional strain and upset they cause—even if seemingly in the background of one’s life—never go away. Here, Elena Lesser Bruun and Suzanne Michael have gathered many stories about emotional cutoffs from psychotherapists, and personal stories from a host of laypeople they encountered in the course of writing this book. Based on their collective clinical experience spanning decades of work with clients, the authors identify basic themes, categories, and cutoff types. They then offer a set of guidelines to facilitate a deeper understanding of the dynamics of cutoffs, suggesting strategies for clinicians to use as they work with clients to overcome the emotional devastation that this sort of relationship breach can cause. Given the magnitude of the problem, its ubiquity, and the psychological complexity associated with it, this book is sorely needed. Each chapter addresses a particular cause for cutoffs, such as abandonment, jealousy, betrayal, matters of principle, and mental illness or substance abuse. All types of relationships are considered: parent-child, other relatives, siblings, former spouses, colleagues, and friends. Close analysis of all these scenarios led the authors to reach many conclusions about cutoffs and how to address them in therapy, including: • Cutoffs are common experiences—prevalent, sometimes embarrassing, and thus an elephant in the therapy room. • Cutoffs are extremely damaging even though people often tell themselves the other person is expendable. They induce involuntary suppression of feelings. • The aftermath of cutoffs can include depression, devastation, dismay, shock, isolation, as well as work problems and physical/psychosomatic issues. • Cutoffs, even decades old, are not always clients’ presenting problem; however, they often surface in the course of therapy.. • Clinicians often fail to identify cutoffs in their clients’ lives, or encourage clients to explore what happened, and to consider taking steps towards reconciliation. The author’s hypothesize reasons for therapists’ hesitancy and suggest ways to overcome it. Helping clients to successfully deal with emotional cutoffs will lead to reduction in self-blame for any lost relationships, less reactivity, and lower anxiety in general. No therapist dealing with this all-too-common, challenging issue should be without this book.

In this major new book, leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalisation and diaspora. The starting point for Ang's discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself "faced with an almost insurmountable difficulty" - surrounded by people who expected her to speak to them in Chinese. She writes: "It was the beginning of an almost decade-long engagement with the predicaments of `Chineseness' in diaspora. In Taiwan I was different because I couldn't speak Chinese; in the West I was different because I looked Chinese". From this autobiographical beginning, Ang goes on to reflect upon tensions between `Asia' and `the West' at a national and global level, and to consider the disparate meanings of `Chineseness' in the contemporary world. She offers a critique of the increasingly aggressive construction of a global Chineseness, and challenges Western tendencies to equate `Chinese' with `Asian' identity. Ang then turns to `the West', exploring the paradox of Australia's identity as a `Western' country in the Asian region, and tracing Australia's uneasy relationship with its Asian neighbours, from the White Australia policy to contemporary multicultural society. Finally, Ang draws together her discussion of `Asia' and `the West' to consider the social and intellectual space of the `in-between', arguing for a theorising not of `difference' but of `togetherness' in contemporary societies.

50 Scientifically-Supported Techniques to Create More Confident and Compelling Speakers

How significant relationship rifts affect people in therapy, and how therapists can help. Scratch the surface of almost any family and you will undoubtedly find a significant cutoff. Nearly everyone has someone in their lives with whom they stopped speaking for one reason or another, or someone who abruptly cut them off. Often these severed ties are forever unresolved, and the emotional strain and upset they cause—even if seemingly in the background of one’s life—never go away. Here, Elena Lesser Bruun and Suzanne Michael have gathered many stories about emotional cutoffs from psychotherapists, and personal stories from a host of laypeople they encountered in the course of writing this book. Based on their collective clinical experience spanning decades of work with clients, the authors identify basic themes, categories, and cutoff types. They then offer a set of guidelines to facilitate a deeper understanding of the dynamics of cutoffs, suggesting strategies for clinicians to use as they work with clients to overcome the emotional devastation that this sort of relationship breach can cause. Given the magnitude of the problem, its ubiquity, and the psychological complexity associated with it, this book is sorely needed. Each chapter addresses a particular cause for cutoffs, such as abandonment, jealousy, betrayal, matters of principle, and mental illness or substance abuse. All types of relationships are considered: parent-child, other relatives, siblings, former spouses, colleagues, and friends. Close analysis of all these scenarios led the authors to reach many conclusions about cutoffs and how to address them in therapy, including: • Cutoffs are common experiences—prevalent, sometimes embarrassing, and thus an elephant in the therapy room. • Cutoffs are extremely damaging even though people often tell themselves the other person is expendable. They induce involuntary suppression of feelings. • The aftermath of cutoffs can include depression, devastation, dismay, shock, isolation, as well as work problems and physical/psychosomatic issues. • Cutoffs, even decades old, are not always clients’ presenting problem; however, they often surface in the course of therapy.. • Clinicians often fail to identify cutoffs in their clients’ lives, or encourage clients to explore what happened, and to consider taking steps towards reconciliation. The author’s hypothesize reasons for therapists’ hesitancy and suggest ways to overcome it. Helping clients to successfully deal with emotional cutoffs will lead to reduction in self-blame for any lost relationships, less reactivity, and lower anxiety in general. No therapist dealing with this all-too-common, challenging issue should be without this book.

A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 A Globe & Mail Book of the Year "A stimulating work on the politics of language." LA Review of Books As globalisation continues languages are disappearing faster than ever, leaving our planet's linguistic diversity leaping towards extinction. The science of how languages are acquired is becoming more advanced and the internet is bringing us new ways of teaching the next generation, however it is increasingly challenging for minority languages to survive in the face of a handful of hegemonic 'super-tongues'. In Speak Not, James Griffiths reports from the frontlines of the battle to preserve minority languages, from his native Wales, Hawaii and indigenous American nations, to southern China and Hong Kong. He explores the revival of the Welsh language as a blueprint for how to ensure new generations are not robbed of their linguistic heritage, outlines how loss of indigenous languages is the direct result of colonialism and globalisation and examines how technology is both hindering and aiding the fight to prevent linguistic extinction. Introducing readers to compelling characters and examining how indigenous communities are fighting for their languages, Griffiths ultimately explores how languages hang on, what happens when they don't, and how indigenous tongues can be preserved and brought back from the brink.

Winner of the 2022 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Shortlisted for the 2022 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Winner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, a lush experimental novel about love as a weapon of empire. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants “returning” to a country she’s never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire—for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other—takes a violent turn that neither of them expected. A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga’s experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?

Are You Too Nice?If you find it hard to be assertive, directly ask for what you want, or say "no" to others, then you just might be suffering from too much niceness.In this controversial book, world-renowned confidence expert, Dr. Aziz Gazipura, takes an incisive look at the concept of nice. Through his typical style, Dr. Aziz uses engaging stories, humor, and disarming vulnerability to cut through the nice conditioning and liberate the most bold, expressive, authentic version of you. You'll discover how to: => Easily say "no" when you want to and need to.=> Confidently and effectively ask for what you want.=> Speak up more freely in all your relationships.=> Eliminate feelings of guilt, anxiety, and worry about what others will think.