SECOND LANGUAGE

 

NEWS:

Ronna has been chosen as the runner-up for the 2006 Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction for SECOND LANGUAGE.

 

"Reading the stories in Second Language is like entering a series of complex, absorbing worlds… This is a beautifully written and deeply satisfying collection."

         – Margot Livesey, critically acclaimed author of novels including Criminals, Eva Moves the Furniture, and Banishing Verona

"The situations of Ronna Wineberg's characters are diverse, but they circle one inescapable theme with flawless emotional accuracy: that few are fulfilled, and even fewer will live out their lives without at least trying, bravely, to make a break for it."

         – Rosellen Brown, award-winning author of Half a Heart, Tender Mercies, and Before and After.

 

"Wineberg's characters are reflective, pensive, torn between what feels right and what feels good. Each woman encounters a troubling path; an ill parent, a decaying marriage, a furious child…Throughout the collection, whether they are standing before their lovers or their spouses, their parents or their doctors, the women in Second Language find that they are able to cope with the seemingly unbearable, and that their instinct and intellect will give them the words." 
       
          – Small Spiral Notebook

While chronicling the ends of relationships, Wineberg is actually planting the beginnings of new life for her characters...These stories possess full, beating hearts that capture our attention and our sympathy. We are immensely attached to the characters. We yearn for understanding in the same way they do...Ronna Wineberg does a wonderful job of showing all her characters fully in the world they inhabit, writing almost in real time of the pain that walks hand in hand with beauty and joy.

         -- Other Voices

"This collection of thirteen stories draws readers into the quietly compelling lives of very ordinary characters who function and suffer in unsettling ways. We are like them and not like them, but their circumstances, while occasionally disturbing, are familiar and strangely magnetic...Just recently, I used "A Crossing" in a class of 165 medical students during a school-wide unit on breast cancer. All students had read the story and were prepared to discuss it with a panel comprised of clinicians and class members.  Because the story involves a doctor who has discovered a lump and her husband, also a physician, and the kind of rational and irrational thoughts that such a discovery might evoke, the class was extremely engaged and responsive. This story was a cancer story, but it was, moreover, their story, their future patient's story, and, of course, the anecdotal story relating to their neighbor or their mother."

        --Lois LaCivita Nixon, Professor of Medicine, Medical Ethics and Humanities   Program, University of South Florida College of Medicine

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What would you leave for your wife if you knew your death was imminent? What would you say to your husband's mistress if your paths should cross?  In SECOND LANGUAGE, her award-winning collection of stories, Ronna Wineberg investigates the bonds that tie us together and how those promises, kept and unkept, are both broken and renewed.

From Sonia, an elderly widow who is looking for closure and finds something new, to Elaine, a divorce lawyer with a vengeance for her husband’s lover, SECOND LANGUAGE is home to a vibrant array of characters who share one thing in common: choices.  At times humorous, despairing and triumphant, the characters in Ronna's astutely observed world include Lucy, who is trying to deal with her mother’s illness while also navigating an adulterous affair, and Sophia, a doctor’s wife whose happenstance relationship with the doorman at her new apartment building imprints her life in ways she never could have imagined. The reader meets others, too, like Mel Hempill, a doctor who makes a house call to a patient, a holocaust survivor, who teaches Mel the value of friendship and love.

 

Faced with life-altering decisions, each of the characters in these stories wrestle with how relationships change over time, and choose a new path, ranging from forgiveness to revenge.

 

New Rivers Press, a not-for-profit literary small press founded in 1968, started the annual Many Voices Project Literary Competition or MVP in 1981, a competition for “new and emerging” writers.  SECOND LANGUAGE was chosen from among 450 contest entries.  For more information, please visit www.newriverspress.com.

 

To purchase SECOND LANGUAGE, visit your local bookstore, or order online from:

Amazon.com 

Powells.com 

BarnesandNoble.com 

Booksense.com 

SECOND LANGUAGE 
ISBN: 0-89823-224-4 
Many Voices Project Winner (MVP) Number 105
New Rivers Press