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Confessions of a Comma Queen
by Mary Norris
Mary Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker's copy department, maintaining its celebrated high standards. Now she brings her vast experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice.
Between You & Me features Norris's laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing problems in spelling, punctuation, and usage - comma faults, danglers, "who" vs. "whom," "that" vs. "which," compound words, gender-neutral language—and her clear explanations of how to handle them. Down-to-earth and always open-minded, she draws on examples from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and the Lord's Prayer, as well as from The Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She takes us to see a copy of Noah Webster's groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on a quest to find out who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick, on a pilgrimage to the world's only pencil-sharpener museum, and inside the hallowed halls of The New Yorker and her work with such celebrated writers as Pauline Kael, Philip Roth, and George Saunders.
Readers - and writers - will find in Norris neither a scold nor a softie but a wise and witty new friend in love with language and alive to the glories of its use in America, even in the age of autocorrect and spell-check. As Norris writes, "The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around."
"Starred Review. An educational, entertaining narrative… Unforgettable anecdotes… Countless laugh-out-loud passages… A funny book for any serious reader." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Norris's handy guide is for writers of all levels. A great addition to public and academic library collections that support writing groups or programs." - Library Journal
A delightful discourse on the most common grammar, punctuation, and usage challenges faced by writers of all stripes… Norris writes with wit, sass, and smarts." - Publishers Weekly
"Between You & Me is smart and funny and soulful and effortlessly illuminating." - Ian Frazier
"Mary Norris brings a tough-minded, clear-eyed, fine-tuned wisdom to all the perplexities and traps and terrors of the English sentence." - Adam Gopnik
"Mary Norris is a grammar geek with a streak of mischief, and her book is obscenely fun." - Marilyn Johnson
"This is as entertaining as grammar can be. Very very. Read it and savor it." - Garrison Keillor
"A delightful mix of autobiography, New Yorker lore, and good language sense." - Ben Yagoda
"Mary Norris is the verbal diagnostician I would turn to for a first, second, or third opinion on just about anything." - John McPhee, in The New Yorker
This information about Between You & Me was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mary Norris is the author of Greek to Me and the New York Times bestseller Between You & Me, an account of her years in The New Yorker copy department. Originally from Cleveland, she lives in New York.
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