Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Daughter of Mother-Of-Pearl

Daughter of Mother-Of-Pearl

Wong, Mandy-Suzanne
Igarashi, Yuka

Paperback

Literary Criticism

Publisher Price: $18.00

ISBN10: 1644453738
ISBN13: 9781644453735
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: Feb 17 2026
Pages: 168
Weight: 0.48
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.60 Depth: 8.23
Language: English

Mollusks' innermost selves are absolute secrets because, not only do they hide in shells or distant habitats, but also that's just how it is with innermost selves.

Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl collects Mandy-Suzanne Wong's reminiscences, dreams, investigations, and experiments in being with small invertebrates whose vulnerability and creativity inspire radical reimaginings of Earthlinghood. In graceful linked essays, Wong wonders: What constitutes a self if a starfish can twist off one of his arms to explore the seafloor on its own? What is an animate being, considering a living snail is also an inanimate shell? What does love mean to a jellyfish, or time to an octopus? Her encounters with nonhuman animals reshape her language into different forms from collage to fragments, and prompt uncommon engagements with various texts. She looks behind words like invasive and endling in scientific articles and in poetry, questions natural selection with a bubble-rafting snail, sees the bivalve in Dostoevsky, and studies a speculative treatise about a vampire squid from hell.

Personal yet de-personal, at once tender and challenging, Wong's essays invite humans to rethink our relationship to other beings. Instead of capturing and destroying them, using them as resources or reflections of ourselves, she asks us only to coexist with them--to cherish them although, and because, we cannot fully know them.

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