By: Maryann Yin,
on 12/10/2014
Fifteen writers have been working as contributors for the “Bookends” column at The New York Times. All of them have revealed the titles that gave them “their favorite reading experience of 2014.” Below, we’ve collected free samples of most of the books on the list for your reading pleasure.
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I’m seventy-five pages into my review copy of Francine Prose’s new book Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 and I’m just not sure what to make of it. It is one of those novels told in multiple voices with sometimes very distant perspectives to the main course of the plot. Most of the telling happens through documents — letters, chapters from a biography, newspaper stories, chapters from a memoir of some kind — but sometimes there is a chapter of regular narrative storytelling. This sort of approach I generally have no issues with, I often like the variety of perspective such a style has to offer. But this time I am struggling with it.
My struggles aren’t because I am having trouble following along or keeping things straight. My struggle comes from how contrived and same-y it feels. Prose can’t seem to find different voices for the different perspectives so they all come across as too much alike. And the letters, ugh! The letters are being written by only one character to his parents, a young man from Hungary who has gone to Paris to try and make his name as a photographer. This is 1924 and the guy is writing stuff to his parents that I wouldn’t write to mine in 2014! Plus the style in which he writes is not a correspondence style, or rather, each letter begins that way but as soon as he starts telling his parents what he has been up to it turns into a regular prose narrative with dialogue conversations that end with a plea for money and a sign off from the loving son. In addition, there are so many different narratives it is getting a bit cacophonous.
And now I find myself wondering if I should even keep reading. The story isn’t bad but it hasn’t grabbed me either. It is all just so-so. I am on the fence over whether I should give it another twenty pages or if I should call it quits because so-so isn’t good enough at the moment and King Lear is taunting me because I know I will love it since it is a reread that I loved the first time around. It is easy to give up on bad books or good books I am definitely not getting along with, but giving up on so-so books is harder because there is still the hope that maybe it will get better in ten more pages. But that can end up being a trap when after ten pages it still isn’t getting better but maybe in ten more. See me talking myself into making this book a DNF? The fence is starting to wobble.
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By: Alice,
on 12/24/2012
It’s the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring, except the writer throwing her manuscript across the room. What words will Santa give her? Gifts of ‘stillicide’ or ‘ectoplasm’ for her National Book Award — or lumps of coal for failing NaNoWriMo. We’d like to share a few reflections on terrible words from writers such as David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Michael Dirda in the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus below.
Joshua Ferris says “Bah, humbug” to… ACTUALLY
Actually is a fashionable word circa 2011, especially in colloquial, voice-driven contemporary writing, and it’s all over the place in everyday speech. It’s used wrongly and excessively, even speciously, and is one of the worst tics of tendentious writing. As a qualifier, it’s fine (Jack is actually eleven, not twelve). As an intensifier (like its brothers literally, really, utterly, and totally), it attempts to replace subjective opinion for objective fact (the play was actually a lot better than Jack thought it was). One can’t use a word that means ‘existing in fact, real’ in the context of something debatable or contentious. I’d suggest a basic usage rule that says whenever you can replace actually with in my opinion, the actually should be avoided.
Zadie Smith says “Bah, humbug” to… BARREN
Nullipara. A woman who has never given birth to a child. One of the few nouns referring to the sexual/reproductive/aging status of a woman that is not in any way pejorative, simply because it is almost never used. Should be printed on T-shirts.
Michael Dirda says “Bah, humbug” to… BRAVE
Excepting the few who boldly confront oppressive laws or governments (Émile Zola, Anna Akhmatova), or those who join fighting brigades where they risk being killed in battle (Ernst Junger, Andre Malraux), no writer should be referred to as brave. Too often modern poets are called brave—or daring or fearless—simply because they write openly about being lonely, sexually frustrated, or drug-dependent. Worse yet, critics sometime present the verbal equivalent of the Silver Star to some assistant professor attempting an unfashionable verse form in his latest contribution to the Powhatan Review. That’s not quite what placing your life on the line means. Save all those courageous adjectives for coal miners, firefighters, and the truly heroic.
David Foster Wallace says “Bah, humbug” to… INDIVIDUAL
As a noun, this word has one legitimate use, which is to distinguish a single person from some larger group: one of the enduring oppositions of British literature is that between the individual and society; or boy, she’s a real individual. I don’t like it as a synonym for person despite the fact that much legal, bureaucratic, and public-statement prose uses it that way—it looms large in turgid writing like law-enforcement personnel apprehended the individual as he was attempting to exit the premises. Individual for person and an individual for someone are pretentious, deadening puff-words; eschew them.
David Auburn says “Bah, humbug” to… QUIRKY
Just as the British use clever as a backhanded insult, meaning ‘merely clever, not actually intelligent or thoughtful,’ quirky is often used to mean ‘mildly and harmlessly peculiar’ with ‘and totally uninteresting’ implied. I hate quirky and hate having it applied to my own writing. I would rather receive a negative review that didn’t use this word than a rave that did.
Francine Prose says “Bah, humbug” to… SCUD
Once I heard a teacher tell a seventh-grade class that this was precisely the sort of verb they should use to make their writing livelier and more interesting. The example she gave was: The storm clouds scudded over the horizon. In fact, this is precisely the sort of word—words that call unnecessary attention to themselves, that sound artificial and stop the reader in mid-sentence—that should not be used for that reason. Or for any reason. When in doubt, use a simpler and more everyday word, and try to make the content of the sentence livelier and more interesting, which is always a better idea. If you don’t have anything fresh to report about the rapidly moving clouds, writing that they scudded won’t help.
David Lehman says “Bah, humbug” to… SYNERGY
Some words don’t work. Synergy is one of them. Theoretically it makes sense. Synergy is a business term, corporate-speak for the advantages of amalgamating the operations of several different but related companies. When, for example, a book publisher merges with a movie studio, one reason given is that there are bound to be significant synergies: ways one branch of the new structure can feed the other. It turns out, however, that the concept is flawed; these mergers seldom go according to plan. And that is surely why you hear the word only in the business news, among executives and mouthpieces for whom hope springs eternal.
Suleiman Osman says “Bah, humbug” to… TECHNICALLY
When someone starts a phrase with the word technically, he or she almost always follows with a statement that is useless or wrong. This is particularly true when a person is using the term as a way to correct someone gently. “Technically, the city is called Par-ee.” Who has not been enjoying a view of a lovely body of water and muttered to oneself “what a beautiful bay,” only to be interrupted by someone who points out that “technically it’s a sound.” Feel free to tell him or her that “technically” there is no difference between a sound, bay, firth, gulf, cove, bight, or fjord. There are only different local conventions. Or if you aren’t sure, you can always ask “technically, according to whom?”
Tell us the words you say “Bah, humbug” to in the comments below.
Much more than a word list, the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus is a browsable source of inspiration as well as an authoritative guide to selecting and using vocabulary. This essential guide for writers provides real-life example sentences and a careful selection of the most relevant synonyms, as well as new usage notes, hints for choosing between similar words, a Word Finder section organized by subject, and a comprehensive language guide. The text is also peppered with thought-provoking reflections on favorite (and not-so-favorite) words by noted contemporary writers, including Joshua Ferris, Francine Prose, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Simon Winchester, many newly commissioned for this edition.
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The post Words like lumps of coal appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 8/31/2012
How do you choose the right word? Some just don’t fit what you’re trying to convey, either in the labor of love prose for your creative writing class, or the rogue auto-correct function on your phone.
Can you shed lacerations instead of tears? How is the word barren an attack on women? How do writers such as Joshua Ferris, Francine Prose, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Simon Winchester weigh and inveigh against words?
We sat down with Katherine Martin and Allison Wright, editors of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, to discuss what makes a word distinctive from others and what writers can teach you about language.
Writing Today, the Choice of Words, and the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus
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Reflections in the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus
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The Use and Abuse of a Thesaurus
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Katherine Martin is Head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. Allison Wright is Editor, US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press.
Much more than a word list, the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus is a browsable source of inspiration as well as an authoritative guide to selecting and using vocabulary. This essential guide for writers provides real-life example sentences and a careful selection of the most relevant synonyms, as well as new usage notes, hints for choosing between similar words, a Word Finder section organized by subject, and a comprehensive language guide. The third edition revises and updates this innovative reference, adding hundreds of new words, senses, and phrases to its more than 300,000 synonyms and 10,000 antonyms. New features in this edition include over 200 literary and humorous quotations highlighting notable usages of words, and a revised graphical word toolkit feature showing common word combinations based on evidence in the Oxford Corpus. There is also a new introduction by noted language commentator Ben Zimmer.
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By: Carmela Martino and 5 other authors,
on 5/16/2011
Summer is just around the corner. How do I know? Because at least once an hour, the TV reminds me that summer isn't be worth living unless I drop a size or two; or a National Tutoring Chain assures me my child's brain will turn into a blank slate over the summer. (I especially like the commercial with equations and words tumbling out of the ears of some hapless kid.
For those of you who don't watch as much TV as I do (guilty, guilty, guilty), the first sign of summer might be The Summer Reading List. I say might because I usually find my daughter's Summer Reading List crumpled under the couch about mid-July. If your child springs forth on the last day of school, waving the SRL and demanding to go to the library right now...which is the kind of kid I was...you might want to skip on down to the Writer's Workout.
Although I was willing to read what the school district thought every third grader should read, I usually lost my enthusiasm by book two or three. I am an omnivorous reader, and always have been. Yet, somehow, the Literary Poobahs in Curriculum Development managed to come up with twenty of the dullest books available for the grade level; Newbery winners, biographies about Important Men (always men, never women) and "classics" of dubious value. But I had to read at least one all the way through, because the first assignment on the first day of school (after the "What-I-Did-On-My-Summer-Vacation"essay) would be a book report on one of the summer list books. Not once did any teacher ask if I liked the book. The point was that words passed before my eyes at some point of those three months.
In my child's school district, book reports have gone the way of the Walkman. Reading is "encouraged" by taking computerized multiple choice tests on Certain Books Approved by the Company Who Sells the Test Software. Certain books are assigned so many points. (I will save my opinion of this sort of thing for another day and rant, but I will tell you that I couldn't pass the test on Yankee Girl...and I wrote the book!)
In short, up until high school, the emphasis is on plot, characters and the odd nitpicky fact. No one ever asked if we liked the book, or not until, my sophomore English teacher. That was a real loser of a year as far as required reading: Silas Marner, A Tale of Two Cities and Les Miserables (before Broadway ditched all the boring parts and added some great music.) Where other teachers acted personally insulted when we didn't froth with delight over Evangeline or The Scarlet Letter, Miss Strain cared. We didn't have to like a book or a character, but we better have a reason why. "Just 'cause" or "It's dumb" were not acceptable reasons. Without telling us, she introduced us to the concept of critical reading.
Many, many years pass. I become a librarian. I read constantly, almost unconsciously. I taught myself to speed read in college, so I blew through dozens of books a month. When I finished, I sometimes had the feeling I had just wasted my time. Other books, I loved so much I had to force myself to slow down and savor every word. Yet, all the time I recommended books to readers (or not), I could not tell you why I did or did not like a book. I assumed that if I didn't like a book, it must be my fault, that I just didn't get it. After all, this writer had a book published, and I didn't.
Many years pass and I finally get the guts to enter an MFA in Writing for Children program. Almost the first thing we newbies are told is that we will be doing a lot of reading. . .and critiquing. Criticism of the educational variety was something that had not crossed my mind since my days in Miss Strain's class.
"To be a writer, you have to learn to read like a writer," we were told.
Uh-oh. No more read
By: Beth Kephart ,
on 1/16/2011
Why does the short story lend itself so naturally to the muted but still shattering sentiments of yearning, nostalgia and regret? How many William Trevor tales focus on the moment when a heart is broken or at least badly chipped? Though Mavis Gallant’s work bristles with barbed wit and trenchant social observation, her most moving stories often pivot on romantic ruptures and repressed attraction. (This is Prose, who then goes on to note the exceptions to the rule while returning to her theme that the "short story has the power to summon, like a genie from a bottle, the ghost of lost happiness and missed chances.")
Reflecting our dazzlingly diverse culture, the contemporary American short story is virtually impossible to define. Where once the “well crafted” short story in the revered tradition of Henry James, Anton Chekhov and James Joyce was the predominant literary model — an essentially realist tradition, subtle in construction and inward rather than dramatic — now the more typical story is likely to be a first-person narration, or monologue: more akin to nonliterary sources like stand-up comedy, performance art, movies and rap music and blogs. Such prose pieces showcase distinctive “voices” as if fictional characters, long restrained by the highly polished language of their creators, have broken free to speak directly and sometimes aggressively to the reader — as in boldly vernacular stories by Junot Díaz, Chuck Palahniuk, Edwidge Danticat, George Saunders, John Edgar Wideman, Denis Johnson and T. C. Boyle, among others. (Yet Edgar Allan Poe, as long ago as 1843, brilliantly gave voice to the manic and utterly convincing murderer of “The Tell-Tale Heart” — perhaps genius is always our contemporary.) (This would be Oates)What, I wonder, do you expect when you read a contemporary short story? Where do you expect it to take you, and by what means? Where do you hope it will leave you? Who is, in your opinion, the best practitioner of the short story today?
By: Bruce Black,
on 3/8/2009
The arc of a story points in one of two directions: upward, lifting your spirits as the characters struggle toward a particular goal, or downward, your spirits drawn into an abyss with the characters as they try to keep their footing while falling ever closer toward disaster.In Francine Prose’s After, a dark harbinger of the future, you can see this downward arc play out in the aftermath of a
By: Beth Kephart ,
on 12/30/2008
I finished reading Goldengrove yesterday morning, before setting off for another day of friendship and holiday camaraderie. It's a book that I am very glad to have read, for I'd wondered about it in theory and needed to appraise it for myself, in actuality. Goldengrove is the story of 13-year old Nico who loses her older sister, suddenly, in an accident at the lake. Little by little, Nico (the narrator) takes on (at the urging of the sister's boyfriend) the traits and appearance of her lost sister, while the father and mother each fall apart in their own ways.
It sounds promising, I know. But the book didn't sit quite right with me on a number of levels. There was its tone—too adult-knowing, too retrospectively infused, on the one hand, and bogged down with surface teen observations, even cliches, on the other. There was the molasses stick of passages (about, say, the side effects of arthritis medications) that advanced neither character nor plot. There was the promise of entanglement, even outright spookiness, but things moved along at too matter-of-fact a pace to lose this reader in anticipation or wonder.
There was dialogue, long passages of it, that sounded like this:
"How are you, Nico?" (the mother of Aaron, the boyfriend) said.
"Okay," I said. "I guess. How's Aaron?"
Aaron's mother eyed the book and let it answer for her.
"Not great," she said. "It's been hard."
"I know," I said.
"I'm sure you do," she said.
"Say hi to him for me," I said. "Tell him to stop by the store and say hi."
"I will," she said.
"Really!" I said, startling myself. "I'd really like to see him."
"I will," she repeated." Take care of yourself, dear."
Lots of "said's" in that, for sure. Nothing the least bit turgid or lean (one or the other might have spiced it), nothing original, nothing that draws a deeper portrait of the characters (this is a rare interaction with Aaron's mother; should she not have been distinguished somehow here, either by what she says, or how?). To me, this passage, like so many others, feels like placeholder writing—like an author sketching out an outline that will be later embellished or deepened.
Except that the "later" didn't happen.
By: Jessica Stockton,
on 12/22/2008
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Goldengrove by Francine Prose (Harper)
(Bonus: Features an independent bookstore!)
This is yet another book that I was motivated to read after hearing the author speak. Francine Prose had the misfortune to be scheduled at McNally Jackson on the same evening as one of the three presidential debates, so the crowd was shockingly sparse for a nationally recognized novelist and essayist. But she was extremely gracious about the situation, and delivered an eloquent talk and reading about her book and surrounding issues.
Goldengrove is actually the name of an independent bookstore in the novel -- a sure-fire way to get me to at least pick it up! (It's also a reference to a wonderful poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins, which I actually memorized as a teenager and have returned to with deepening appreciation as an adult.) The store becomes the refuge of the 13-year-old protagonist during the summer after her adored older sister drowns -- it's owned by her parents, who are grieving in their own way, and the shop offers our heroine both social encounters and solitude. She ultimately finds herself in a dreamy Vertigo-style relationship with her sister's grieving boyfriend, and must navigate her own path out of the fog of memory.
Prose responded to a question from the audience about her 1998 Harper's article about sexism in book reviews by acknowledging that gender disparities still exist in the world of literature. For example, this novel about a 13-year-old girl is getting far less critical attention than Prose's previous one about a male holocaust denier. She attributes this in part to the contemporary sense that novels about teenagers are Young Adult literature (which would knock Huckleberry Finn and Catcher In The Rye and A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and Maggie, Girl of the Streets out of the Real Literature realm), and in part to the adage (which booksellers know) that "girls will read books about boys, but boys won't read books about girls."
Whether or how widely this is true, it would be a terrible shame if it kept readers, adult or teen, away from this novel, which is a highly allusive and sophisticated work of ventriloquism, examining the horrors of loss and misplaced identity through the eyes of a character utterly unlike Prose herself. (Though, as she opines, "we've all been a 13-year-old girl at some point in our lives.) My coworkers agree with the books irresistible merit, and I hope many readers will discover the universal appeal of Prose's most recent work.
By: Jason Boog,
on 3/21/2008
Sometimes I ask myself why I pay high rents and fight crowded subways to live in New York City. But then I end up on a cruise ship in Red Hook, and I remember exactly why I'm here.
Yesterday I took a surreal trip to the Queen Mary 2 cruise ship parked outside the Brooklyn docks--all to hear novelist Francine Prose and a motley crew of writers celebrate the upcoming PEN World Voices Festival.
Running from April 29 until May 4th in New York, it will feature a heck of a list, everybody from Charles Baxter to Mia Farrow to A.M. Homes to Salman Rushdie. If you are anywhere near New York, you should check it out--you can learn a lot.
As you can tell, I've got music and vacation on the brain. If you want to talk about music, 52 Projects is looking for your advice--asking "What's the best music to write to?"
By: ms. froggie,
on 8/16/2007
CACKLE, CACKLE, CACKLE, CACKLE!!!! (ahem.)
i've been working on a halloweenie illio today for a client, going slowwwwww as my brain is definitely winding down for the summer. (camps are over and children are always borrreeedd!)
so, i decided to have my lil witchie help me out today. she's the googly-eyed one with the bucket, working the night shift at the gallery. to your left, a margarita induced witch - black comic marker on white paper turned "magically" green in psd. um, then, a self portrait (HAH!) with my left hand and crayolas. (that was soo much harder to do than i anticipated.) and the one on the end, a creepy digital one of the THREE WITCHES OF HECATE, from MACBETH, for a education client.
This was a FUN one, bear! :))) liked using my noodle on it! :))
I love the idea of having students keep a critique notebook where they can critique a variety of things. Thanks for sharing this, MA.