Description: This book "traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family's history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar. But while her family's stories move into the present, her own story--that of a writer seeking to understand who she is--moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book"--
Review Quotes:
"[A] hypnotic memoir. . . . In lyrical prose, Myint straddles dream and reality. . . . Her poetic narration is indisputably alluring. . . . This serpentine narrative is a thing of beauty."--Publishers Weekly
"Composed in compressed, laser-sharp interrogations of immigration and prejudice, colonialism and inheritance, Names for Light reads like poetry. . . . In its power, intensity, and visual presentation, Names for Light evokes recent works of Claudia Rankine."--NPR.org "Names For Light is itself the "place" where the family's past - and Myint's dynamically evolving present -- approach each other. The tug and pull of these forces, and the broader awareness of tyranny in the world, comprise an environment for the reader that is both demanding in its multiple vectors and gratifying in its patterning and acute intelligence."--On The Seawall "Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is driving an important autobiographical rickshaw into the twenty-first century."--Vi Khi Nao "Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is one of the most remarkable writers of our time, and Names for Light is a piercing and heartbreaking revelation."--Janice Lee, author of Damnation and The Sky Isn't Blue "Myint's geographies and her syntax will echo inside you like luminous ghosts: opulent and ruthless and profound, like drowned sapphires waiting to be reunited with the wind."--Lily Hoang