A practical, nonboring companion for writers aiming to hone their style.
A self-described "language enthusiast" analyzes memorable sentences.
Woods, author of English Grammar for Dummies, among dozens of other books on writing and literature, offers an upbeat, informative guide for writers and readers, focused on the power of sentences. Each of the 25 chapters highlights one exemplary sentence, supplemented by many others that illustrate the same technique, drawn from a capacious range of sources, including Virginia Woolf, Stephen King, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, the King James Bible, and even ads for potato chips, candy, and soda. Woods avoids literary jargon and carefully explains terms that might be unfamiliar to nonspecialist readers. Looking at structure, for example, she identifies several interesting constructions—parallelism, reversed sentences, questions, for example—and “crossed sentences,” which she calls “the neon signs of the sentence world. They attract attention.” Her primary example is John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” and she also cites Groucho Marx: “Money will not make you happy, and happy will not make you money.” Some sentences, notes the author, succeed through surprise, such as Lucille Ball’s “The secret to staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.” A section on diction examines verbs, tone, word shifts (Gertrude Stein’s “There is no there there” is one example), and inventive coinage. Poetry appears most frequently in chapters on sound (onomatopoeia, repetition, and matching sounds) and visual presentation. A section on connection/comparison analyzes use of the first person and second person, synesthesia, and contrast—e.g., Neil Armstrong’s famous “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” A final section on “Extremes” focuses on unusually long “marathon sentences” and sentences that are marvels of concision, such as E.M. Forster’s “Only connect.” Each chapter ends with inventive writing exercises.
A practical, nonboring companion for writers aiming to hone their style.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00485-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Acerbic reflections on being digital.
A trip into social media.
In her debut book, writer, artist, memer, and influencer Arata gathers 10 essays about power, identity, commodification, and, not least, reality. Like Umberto Eco in Travels in Hyperreality, Arata depicts a world of fakes, artificiality, and commercialization: in short, the seductive milieu of cyberspace. “In Real Life,” the title of an essay about her 10-day stay at a Carthusian cloister, could serve for many other pieces, as well, in which she contrasts the world of the internet—“AIM, LiveJournal, chatrooms”—with tangible, physical spaces. Real-life interactions, she admits, leave her feeling anxious, while social media offers a chance at transformation. She writes, “There was nothing remarkable about me—nothing special enough to justify my existence—but if I posted enough for my twenty-eight friends, the meaning of my life might come together, the mundane made lapidary. Better than the right to exist: the right to be someone else.” Becoming an influencer enhances that sense of being someone else. Influencers, she asserts, are “power traders of the attention economy, they mediate the sharp sleaze of advertising into something soft and trustworthy.” Besides the huge amount of free merchandise companies shower on influencers, she’s even more excited by the ability to affect people’s behavior. “The impulse to influence was humiliating, but also intoxicating, or maybe intoxicating because it was humiliating,” she writes. “I could easily, happily, sell and be sold.” In “My Year of Earning and Spending,” she recounts both sides: ghost-writing affiliate memes for an ad agency and buying useless stuff with her earnings—slick polyester sheets, pink platform crocs, a subscription to Enchanted Living Magazine. Narcissism, the compulsion to post, sincerity, and authenticity thread through Arata’s essays on the chaos of memedom and the heady influencer economy.
Acerbic reflections on being digital.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781538767597
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Zero gravitas, zero laughs—satisfying only to the most die-hard of Allen fans.
A tired blend of putatively comic stories old and new, and good luck telling them apart.
Once a regular in the New Yorker, from which many of these pieces (the most recent from 2013) are gathered, Allen serves up stories that will make readers long for his Without Feathers heyday. The jokes are thin, the puns obvious and labored unless you crack up at character names such as Al Capon, “a small-time egg baron.” Many stories center on showbiz types, often has-beens struggling to remain relevant or even employed. In that poultry-lashed yarn, for instance, the narrator recounts a “circus geek whose specialty is eating a live chicken” playing before a barnyard of birds, one of whose members, “flapping and squawking uncooperatively, managed to vitiate all pathos.” In one of many creepy moments, Allen’s protagonist describes himself as “a supplicant who has yet to achieve double digits when it comes to bedding the juicy gender,” by way of prelude to a Hollywood carnal encounter featuring “the sleek, white-jacketed Chinese houseboy, Hock Tooey.” A later story hinges on the prospect of an orgy, a bit of shtick fit for 1960s-era Playboy, while another tale that plays on the racist “Confucius Say” trope—see the Chinese houseboy above—is a flat-out embarrassment. The most current reference is to Brad Pitt, who, an impresario hopes, will play opposite to “a hot blond biologist…kind of an Eve Curie but with a great rack” who “wears a tight white lab coat” and “the black bikini underwear she got as a gift from her peers for making the Nobel short list.” One of the book’s rare winning bits involves a man “reincarnated as a lobster” and latching onto Bernie Madoff’s nose. Read the whole thing as an anachronism that belongs on the cutting-room floor circa Love and Death, and you’re on the mark.
Zero gravitas, zero laughs—satisfying only to the most die-hard of Allen fans.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956763-29-4
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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