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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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July 27, 2007

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE WATER CURE

We are big, big, big, big fans of Percival Everett and he's an L.A. writer to boot.  (He is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC.)  We fell in love with his hilarious novel Erasure and have been reading him ever since. 

His new novel, The Water Cure, comes to us courtesy of the fine folks at Graywolf Press, who describe the book thus:

Wc The Water Cure is the chilling confession of a victim turned villain. Ishmael Kidder is a successful romance novelist. His agent is coming to visit her usually productive client. But Kidder’s eleven-year-old daughter has been brutally murdered, and it stands to reason that he must take revenge by any means necessary. The punishment is carried out without guilt, and with the usual equipment—duct tape, rope, and super glue. But how will he explain the noises in the basement to his agent? How does he know he has the right man?

You can read more about this fine novelist and legitimate L.A. treasure at Blue Flower Arts or in conversation with our good pal Robert Birnbaum.  Or you can stop messing around and enter the giveway.  The rules, surprisingly, are unchanged: drop us an email, subject line "CURE ME".  Please include your full mailing address (some of you folks still mess that one up), and, as ever, previous winners ineligible.  We'll take entries until 3 p.m. PST at which time the Random Number Generator will declare a winner.

UPDATE: Congratulations to winner Mike Simpson of Lancaster, PA.  Have a find weekend, folks.

Posted by TEV at 12:19 AM in Giveaways |

Comments

This book is GREAT. Highly recommended.

Posted by: Patrick Stephenson | July 27, 2007 at 09:58 AM

So glad you love "Erasure" So do I. I put it in my list of little-known fiction by African-Americans that went with my NYTBR essay "Writers Like Me." Hope it got "Erasure" a few readers.

Posted by: Martha Southgate | July 27, 2007 at 03:15 PM

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