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December 22, 2006

Comments

Paul

liked it. can i have a copy?
think you should do this more often with good stuff, then tie in to a one click sort of thing where we could buy the book.

mai wen

I already had this on my wishlist and now I'm really excited for it to come out in March! Thanks for sharing the excerpt. I work in a cubicle now (I'm actually in one as I type!) and can't wait to get out and go back to school, hopefully this book will only further inspire me! :)

patty haley

Wow Joshua Ferris is living "our lives".

ann chambers

I havn't worked in a office in a long time and now that Joshua has brought me back, I can't wait to find out what's going on. Hurry up March.

Karenlee

I also cannot wait for this book. It's been pre-ordered ever since I read this same first chapter that was excerpted in Nick Hornby's 'Polysyllabic Spree'.

Coco

Your initial impulse was right on. This totally blows.

Mark

Try Sam Moffie's 1st novel-SWAP. There is someone to keep both eyes on.

PJ

Three paragraphs in, I felt depressed; by the end of the excerpt, I felt suicidal. Nope, won't be buying this one.

Grimble

At first I thought it was writerly sour grapes on my part making me think this was so affected and precious I could practically smell the lifeless workshop table. Then I realized, no, it really IS so affected and precious I could practically smell the lifeless workshop table.

Gazza

Thank you for saying that about the lifeless workshop table, not because I agreed with it, but because I thought the extract was great and it had just completely demoralised me as a writer. Now I can go back to my own writing feeling a bit better.

Marcus

It's like someone rewrote "The Things They Carried" to set it in a pre-dot-bomb office. Amusing, well crafted, and unimaginative.

Bordergirl

Why read the book - this excerpt says it all.

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TEV DEFINED


  • 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."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."