Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashbook of Style, a Beastly Guide Through the Writer's Labyrinth - Hardcover

Gordon, Karen Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679442421 ISBN 13: 9780679442424

Publisher: Pantheon, 1997

Synopsis

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, in this engaging, Gothic, quick-fix handbook--an ideal complement to The Deluxe Transitive Vampire--playfully instructs her readers about grammar and style as she plunges them into her magical world teeming with a wildly imaginative menagerie of winged and terrestrial creatures. Six eccentric fictional authorities, including sex-changing Natty Ampersand and Medievalist Vargas Scronx, give the book a sense of send-up in addition to its trusty practicality. A farouche faun with cloven hoofs, black rats, sirens and sphinxes, turbaned serpents, dragons, brigands and a butler make their appearance in unforgettable sentences and imaginary landscapes, such as brooding Trajikistan, to beguile the reader through such confusions and corrections as dangling and misplaced modifiers, double negatives, parallel construction, and a voluptuous riot of word abuses and preferable usage.

Gordon also tames such confusing grammatical beasts as the elliptical clause, split infinitives, and many more. Rikki Ducornet has drawn more than fifty whimsical illustrations that capture the eccentric spirit of the text.

Torn Wings and Faux Pas makes the reader laugh  out loud and shiver with pleasure while experiencing style, vocabulary, and the structures of language as a perpetual and fiendish delight.

About this title

Review:

The author of The Deluxe Transitive Vampire and The New Well-Tempered Sentence returns with a styleguide for the gothic set, featuring a cast of feathered duchesses, baby dragons, and lascivious banditti. As always, Karen Elizabeth Gordon's sample sentences are beguiling enough to distract even the staunchest logophile from the matter at hand. Nonetheless, she manages to tidily dispose of some of the English language's most ancient and troublesome dilemmas, from the difference between "affect" and "effect" to the intricacies of the split-infinitive debate. Enhanced by the tiny, whimsical line drawings of Rikki Ducornet, this is one styleguide you just might read like a novel.

About the Author:

Karen Elizabeth Gordon is the author of The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, The New Well-Tempered Sentence, The Ravenous Muse, The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales, The Disheveled Dictionary, and Paris Out of Hand: A Wayward Guide. She divides her time between Berkeley, California, and France.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679442421
• ISBN 13: 9780679442424
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204