Mother Tongue

In 84 brief, brilliant texts that combine fiction and essay, an acclaimed Mexican author examines the role of language in our lives with insight and humor.

Forced to work with used notebooks, students learn to get creative and fill the limited space.

A man makes his way through Anna Karenina in fits and starts, telling himself that he’s laying the foundation for the day he’ll read it properly.

A woman feels isolated with a husband and daughter who don’t speak her native language, and he begins to question how well he actually knows his wife.

Touching on a host of celebrated authors who shaped his life and writing—from Homer to Kafka, Camus, and Beckett—Fabio Morábito offers a delightful, multifaceted meditation on expressing ourselves through words. What do our libraries say about us? What differentiates poetry from prose? Why do interpreters forget what they translate so quickly? How can reading change us and how others see us?Fabio Morábito was born in Egypt to an Italian family. When he was fifteen, his family relocated from Milan to Mexico City, and he has written all his work in Spanish ever since. He has published five books of poetry, five short-story collections, one book of essays, and two novels, and has translated into Spanish the work of many great Italian poets of the twentieth century, including Eugenio Montale and Patrizia Cavalli. Morábito has been awarded numerous prizes, most recently the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, Mexico’s highest literary award, for Home Reading Service (Other Press, 2021). His short-story collections include Mothers and Dogs (Other Press, 2023) and The Shadow of the Mammoth (Other Press, 2025). He lives in Mexico City.

Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. His translation of Jeannette Clariond’s Image of Absence won the International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English. Bauer teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.