Description

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The bestselling modern classic by the author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden about a deaf couple, their hearing child, and the bond they create through sign language, featuring a new introduction by Sara Nović, author of the New York Times bestseller True Biz, and a new afterword by the author

“Astute and wholly authentic . . . This novel isn’t only one of deaf hardship, but also one of bravery and great joy. . . . Over the course of it, I was often as gripped . . . as I am while reading a thriller.” —Sara Nović, from the Introduction

A Penguin Classic

Abel and Janice meet at a school for the deaf. Sign language brings them together, enabling them to survive and, indeed, to forge a love too powerful to be broken by the world into which they were born. Spanning forty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, In This Sign follows the lives of Abel, Janice, and their hearing daughter, Margaret, as they contend uneasily with the “Outside”—a world designed, often purposely, to be inhospitable to those like them.

First published in 1970, only a decade after ASL’s formal recognition as a language and well before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, In This Sign stands out as a rare, compassionate portrait of the deaf community.

About the Author

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Joanne Greenberg is an internationally renowned, award-winning author of sixteen novels and four collections of short stories, most notably the novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which has sold millions of copies and was adapted into a 1977 movie and a 2004 play of the same name. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Greenberg graduated from American University, where she majored in anthropology and English. She became interested in deaf culture through her husband, Albert, who was a vocational rehabilitation counselor for the State of Colorado. Two of her short stories were published in Outcasts and Angels: The New Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature, edited by Edna Edith Sayers, and In This Sign was made into an Emmy Award–winning Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie titled Love Is Never Silent. Greenberg lives near Lookout Mountain, Colorado, where she writes daily, tutors Latin and Hebrew, is active in the Beth Evergreen congregation, has been an adjunct professor of cultural anthropology and fiction writing at the Colorado School of Mines, and has volunteered as an EMT.

Sara Nović (introduction) is the author of the New York Times bestseller True Biz and Girl at War, which won the American Library Association’s Alex Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied fiction and literary translation, and is an instructor of Deaf studies and creative writing. She lives in Philadelphia with her family.

Praise For…

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“From its first pages, it’s clear how effective Greenberg is at capturing the nuances of deaf culture. . . . Greenberg’s novel is nuanced in its portrayal of deaf people compared to the general understanding at the time. . . . Impressively, Greenberg is also leagues ahead of her contemporaries; deaf characters of note immediately before and after the publication of In This Sign are almost laughably one-dimensional in comparison . . . with even talented writers seeming either incurious about dismantling deaf-related clichés or bolstered by the rhetoric of saviorism to speak over the deaf in problematic ways. . . . Greenberg make[s] the minutiae of our daily lives feel . . . monumental.” —Sara Nović, from the Introduction

“A miracle of empathy.” —The New York Times

“A haunting book . . . unforgettably vivid.” —Library Journal