The Theft of Another’s Self: Review of S.L. Huang’s The Language of Liars

Kathryn Raver Under Review: The Language of Liars. S.L. Huang. Tordotcom, April 2026. In her essay “Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations: On The Colonial Phenomenon of Rendition as Translation”, translator Mona Kareem questions the notion of translation as a “bridge”. “Doesn’t translation act also as unconditional access,” she asks, “as surveillance, as an expanding force of the global capitalist market of literature?” Though Kareem poses this question in the context of literary translation, her argument is also applicable to the relationship between language and colonial exploitation more generally. This relationship is brilliantly illustrated in S.L. Huang’s new novella, The Language of Liars. Huang plunges us into a mind-bending sci-fi examination of the role of language in imperial enterprise, and forces us to consider the questions: what does it truly mean to understand, and who does that understanding benefit? The story centers on Ro, a struggling but…