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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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« GUEST REVIEW: LOS ANGELES NOIR | Main | WHAT'S IN YOUR BATHROOM? »

May 25, 2007

TEV GIVEAWAY: DUCHESS OF NOTHING

First off, if you're waiting for a promised giveaway book, please bear with us.  We're seriously behind in our planned Post Office run.  All books will ship next week.

Don Courtesy of our publisher Bloomsbury (we never tire of saying that), we're happy to offer up a copy of Heather McGowan's highly praised novel Duchess of Nothing, now available in paperback.  Here's what the New York Times had to say about it:

HEATHER McGOWAN'S new novel is unrepentantly difficult. In fact, it has all the elements required by the most demanding graduate student: an unreliable narrator, slippery wordplay, obsessive references to "Moby-Dick." But it also has a sneaky, irresistible charm.

You know the drill. Send us an email with subject line: NOTHING FOR SOMETHING and please please please include your full mailing address. (Every week, at least one of you forgets.)  We'll stop taking names at 3 p.m. PST and run the random number generator and announce a winner. As always, previous winners are ineligible.

As for next week, we're heading off on Wednesday to NY for BEA, so posting will be light until we get situated.  And in view of the Monday holiday, when traffic around here tends to plummet, we plan a short post on an underappreciated genre - bathroom reading.

UPDATE: We're heading out for an appointment, so we're pulling the pin a bit earlier than planned.  Congratulations to Jonathan Schumann, who's right here in L.A.  Enjoy the holiday weekend, y'all.

Posted by TEV at 04:01 AM in Giveaways |

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Brian Hadd

Duchess of Nothing rocked period and also was not difficult or unrepentant either so you email quick because this offer rocks! By.

The Hood Company

Posted by: Brian Hadd | May 25, 2007 at 09:42 AM

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