Elvis Lives!: and Other Anagrams - Softcover

Agee, Jon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374420955 ISBN 13: 9780374420956

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2004

Synopsis

Jon Agee presents another installment of witty wordplay with Elvis Lives!, a book of over sixty anagrams (words or phrases rearranged to form new words or phrases), each hilariously illustrated by the author.

An IRA-CBC Children's Choice
A Parents' Choice Recommended Book

About this title

About the Author:

Jon Agee's collections of palindromes include So Many Dynamos! and Palindromania!, both IRA-CBC Children's Choices, Go Hang a Salami! I'm a Lasagna Hog!, and Sit on a Potato Pan, Otis! He lives in San Francisco, California.

From Publishers Weekly:

With characteristic glee, oxymoron and palindrome fiend Agee (Who Ordered the Jumbo Shrimp?; Sit on a Potato Pan, Otis!) here presents a set of anagrams--some of them borrowed from other wordplay enthusiasts. In this latest effort to unravel and reconstitute language, he demonstrates how letters can be rearranged to produce new meanings and pumps up the humor with pen-and-ink cartoons. Four sequential opening pages follow a fellow with a recognizable pompadour and polyester suit as he emerges from a manhole, proceeds to a billboard reading "Elvis" and shuffles the word to spell "Lives." (He reappears on the closing page, posing on a billboard for "Levi's.") In the single-page images that follow, "astronomer" converts to "moonstarer," and a pig pronounces a "dormitory" chamber a "dirty room." A spread of serpentine freeways that would inspire claustrophobia in Mario Andretti accompanies "Southern California" as "hot sun, or life in a car." In each case, Agee wittily unifies the dual results with his illustrations. For sophisticates, a sketch of an artist's studio shows "Piet Mondrian" pausing in his work to say, "I paint modern." And for fans who've noted the artist's penchant for depicting inmates, he offers a double entendre with a picture of prisoners painting vertical lines in their cell: "Stripes/persist." Agee--who must be one heck of a Scrabble player by now--creates a sketchbook of sorts that exposes words' hidden secrets. Ages 6-up. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0374420955
• ISBN 13: 9780374420956
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80