E. L. Albán

Stories That Words Told Me E. L. Albán First edition

Read the Review! The book is a compilation of short stories about words. Some of the stories are biographical, some are fictional, and some are pure fantasy. The book makes the case that words are more mysterious and impressionistic than their precise definitions would have us believe. They embody experiences from our own lives in their makeup and they, like people, often leave an imprint of the time they came into our memory. Our relationship with them can become uniquely personal and worthy of a story. Some words come and go with the fickle acclaim of pop culture, enjoying their fifteen minutes of fame before being banished to oblivion. Others change through time, reinventing themselves, acquiring different connotations in order to survive and keep their live footing in the dictionary. Because words are inextricably tied to personal experiences, they get equal billing with the persons who misused them and confused them, with the young man whose lips could not utter words of love, with a mother's hopes for her handicapped infant son to say the word 'mama', with a family's quandary in choosing the words for a tombstone, and with the frustration of travelers needing to know the meaning of a word in a foreign tongue.