The Transitive Vampire

Playful and practical, this is the style book you can't wait to use, a guide that addresses classic questions of English usage with wit and the blackest of humor. Gordon has taken her enormously successful book of English usage and expanded it to include more rules, fine points, examples, and illustrations. Playful and practical, this style book combines classic questions of usage with wit and the blackest of humor.

Playful and practical, this is the style book you can't wait to use, a guide that addresses classic questions of English usage with wit and the blackest of humor. Black-and-white illustrations throughout.

The basic rules governing the use of periods, semicolons, hyphens, commas, and other punctuation marks are illustrated by original explanations and humorous sample sentences. Reprint.

Uses imaginative examples to illustrate the meaning of words from abrogate, brouhaha, and cachinnate to susurration, truculence, and voluble.

An illustrated guide to a surrealist Paris. At the Cinema l'Ange des Sables, they show only movies shot in the desert, while in the Cafe Dada you insert food into an automatic dispenser and get money. By the author of The Red Shoes.

Best known for her Gothic language handbooks (reissued recently as The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire), Karen Elizabeth Gordon here turns her extraordinary talents to fiction, and the result is as unconventional as her seductive grammar dramas. The Red Shoes consists of tatters of a half-dozen tales ("The Glass Shoe," "The Gingerbread Variations," "The Little Match Girl," "Don Juan Is a Woman," and the title story, among others) sewn together into a novel by two seamstresses. "Fabric, fabrication--such is the stuff of these lost chronicles come together here," Gordon writes in her introduction. "Swinging their hatboxes, swaying their hips, chapters with torn slips wander in on high heels and blistered feet." Looking back to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, but also casting sidelong glances at metafictional sugardaddies like Queneau, Nabokov, Cortazar, Gass, and Milorad Pavic, The Red Shoes is a Rabelaisian romp through the language of sensuality.

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.

From the author of The Deluxe Transitive Vampire comes this delightful collection of writings about food, drink, and the art of eating. Drawing on excerpts from more than 50 writers--Barthes, Balzac, Mandelstam, McPhee, Marquez, and Joyce among them--Gordon gives us a funny, surprising, and wonderfully macabre book.