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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."
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« ALDEN PYLE IS TURNING OVER IN HIS GRAVE | Main | NEW YORKER FESTIVAL VIDEOS »

October 19, 2006

HIS MOTHER MUST BE VERY PROUD

Everything is Illuminated is the first winner of the Jbooks.com people's choice award for the decade's best work of Jewish fiction. 

The award, and a $5,000 check, will be presented Nov. 15 at the Koret International Jewish Book Awards ceremony in San Francisco. That doesn't mean Foer's novel really is the decade's best book, not by the usual standards. It just means that the more than 1,500 readers who cast their votes in the six-week, online contest liked it better than the other five contenders, a list judges whittled down from 115 readers' suggestions.

The credence one gives to such an award depends on whether one prefers a laurel wreath bestowed by the crowd or the critics.

We were looking for some kind of jbooks/jdate joke but it's just not flowing this morning.  Sorry, people.

Posted by TEV at 12:30 AM in Litlinks |

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