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Tender Grammars

Book

Pages: 240

Illustrations: 1 illustration

Release Date: February 23, 2027

Subjects
Literature and Literary Studies > Creative Nonfiction, General Interest

Tender Grammars is a collection of lyrical essays chronicling love across language barriers and cross-cultural exchange. Through intimate portraits and braided essays, Serena Alagappan tells the true stories of people who fell in love without speaking the same language or who learned a new language for love. Alagappan explores how couples navigate first phrases, missteps, and misunderstandings; how they search for belonging in each other’s families and cultures; and how language itself shapes who we become in love. Along the way, Alagappan considers what these relationships built across words and worlds can teach us about communication and connection. Blending insights from psychology, translation studies, linguistics, and anthropology with Alagappan’s own bicultural perspective, she reveals how learning another language can transform how we listen, express, and understand ourselves and the world around us.

Praise

“Serena Alagappan understands that to reach for a word in someone else’s tongue is to reach for the person, and that what we conceal in one language we sometimes confess by accident in another. Tender Grammars is a beautiful study of what love sounds like at the edge of fluency.” - Aaron Robertson, author of The Black Utopians and translator of Beyond Babylon

“Serena Alagappan has a brilliant, kaleidoscopic mind, one this book makes legible. She blends poetry, reporting and linguistics in a way few could. Her sensitive storytelling enlarged me—inviting me to practice a richer compassion. This book, and her wisdom, will enlarge you as well.” - Lauren Jackson, deputy editorial director and host of Believing at the New York Times

“Tender Grammars made me want to fall in love in a language I don’t speak yet. Serena Alagappan spent years eavesdropping on multilingual couples and turned it into the best case I've read for why getting lost in translation might be the most romantic thing that can happen to you. I wish I had come up with the idea for this incredibly special book myself.” - Amanda Montell, New York Times bestselling author of Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

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Author/Editor Bios Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

Serena Alagappan is the author of the chapbook, Sensitive to Temperature. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, POETRY, and elsewhere. A Rhodes Scholar and senior editor at Poets & Writers Magazine, she lives in New York City.

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