The Miracle of Language by Richard Lederer

Richard Lederer

William Safire has sparked many word debates, but also burning brightly is 65-year-old word detective and language lecturer Lederer (Anguished English , etc.). Continue reading »

Richard Lederer

Noted linguist Lederer (Anguished English) has a naughty side, which, combined with his unerring archival instincts, makes this collection of wordplays a bawdily noteworthy achievement. As long as Continue reading »

Richard Lederer

This collection of light-hearted essays pokes, prods and pinches the English language, taunting and protecting it like an older brother might for his weakling sibling. Lederer, a language columnist Continue reading »

Richard Lederer

Fourth in the Anguished English series (The Bride of Anguished English, More Anguished English, etc.), Lederer's newest collection of grammatical goofs will illicit laughs from start to finish. Continue reading »

Richard Lederer, John Shore

Lederer has long been one of America's most popular experts on language and grammar, but here he seems to be taking his cue from Lynn Truss in focusing on the ins and outs of commas, semi-colons and Continue reading »

Richard Lederer

A journalist, teacher at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., and public-radio commentator, Lederer ( Anguished English ; Get Thee to a Punnery ) again adroitly mixes instruction with hilarity by Continue reading »

Richard Lederer

Lederer ``adroitly mixes instruction with hilarity by showing that English, though the richest and most widely used of all the world's languages, is `crazy.' The text is a dazzling collection of Continue reading »

Richard Lederer

In this collection of entertaining and enlightening essays, Lederer ( Anguished English ) celebrates language as ``incomparably the finest of our achievements'' and passes along some eloquent Continue reading »

Richard Lederer

Prolific wordsmith Lederer's latest gathering of essays and columns--some new, some culled from Writer's Digest , Verbatim , etc.--is a word-lover's delight. It includes several personal pieces, like Continue reading »

Andrea Barrett

An overweight, complacent American woman on a 1986 visit to Beijing becomes fascinated with China and energetically embraces a new life in this affecting tale. Continue reading »

Brian Fair Berkey

A wisecracking Berkeley graduate evades gangsters and police while a journalist investigates a topless dancer's death in this grand tour of Tulsa's extensive seamy side. ``Berkey's only bad habit is Continue reading »

Ivan Gold, Avan Gold

Two decades after his promising '60s debut, Gold makes a welcome return, distilling his own bout with alcoholism into the story of Jason Sams, failed writer and hopeless drunk. Continue reading »

Elinor Lipman

Quiet and content April Epner, a high school Latin teacher whose adoptive parents are recently deceased, is claimed by her birth mother, an obnoxious TV talk show hostess. ``Raising laughter and Continue reading »

Elinor Lipman, Elinor Upman

In an enchanting second novel--a BOMC selection in cloth--Lipman traces the untriumphant return of 30-year-old Melinda LeBlanc to her recently gentrified Massachusetts hometown after a decade of Continue reading »

Stephen McCauley, Robert Thurman

This heartbreaking book eloquently depicts the compromises that lovers and families make to keep relationships alive. Continue reading »

Susan Minot

A coming-of-age story set in turn-of-the-century Boston from the author of Monkeys . Continue reading »

Stephen M. Fried

Charts international cover girl Gia Carangi's descent from $10,000-a-day modeling jobs to heroin addiction and death from AIDS at age 26. Photos. Continue reading »

Kirin Narayan

This charming first novel portrays the romantic mishaps that attend a shy Indian graduate student's attempts to adjust to life in Berkeley, Calif. Continue reading »

Louise Meriwether

This novel from the author of Daddy Was a Numbers Runner portrays a slave's escape from Charleston, S.C., during the Civil War. Continue reading »

Banana Yoshimoto

The author of Kitchen, portrays a dead Japanese writer's story collection and a mysterious curse that dooms those who attempt to translate the last one. Continue reading »

Terry McMillan

This is a story of love between Zora, an independent, aspiring singer, and Franklin, a sometimes-employed carpenter. Life has been unkind to these star-crossed lovers, but they're both survivors. Continue reading »

Bernard Gotfryd

Hours before she was deported to the concentration camp where she was murdered, the author's mother begged him to survive ``to tell the world what the Nazis did to us.'' With his simple, affecting Continue reading »

David Carkeet

Dr. Jeremy Cook becomes the prime suspect in a double murder at the linguistic development institute where he works in Double Negative , a debut novel PW called ``a first-rate thriller.'' Cook Continue reading »

James Hynes, Ma

This novel of Northern Ireland and an American courier jeopardized by his IRA sympathies is paced like a thriller and conveyed through gritty dialogue and detail. Continue reading »

Ellen Lesser

In 11 supple short stories, Lesser writes about now-generation young women who plug along at literary/journalistic or arty jobs while hovering on the margins of other people's lives. ``The Continue reading »

Anthony Burgess

Fifty years in the lives of two families--one Russian-Welsh, another Jewish--are traced from WW I to the founding of Israel. PW described this as ``a novel that is for the most part breathlessly Continue reading »

Oscar Hijuelos

The chaotic experience of Cubans transplanted to New York City throbs through the narrator's voice in this debut novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love . Continue reading »

Sarah Glasscock

Anna, an oft-married hairdresser residing in Texas, plans ownership of a beauty shop while being wooed by a widower and his daughter. ``With authentic, if garrulous, dialogue, the unconventional love Continue reading »

Bret Lott, Witte

These short stories evoke the quiet yet frequently desperate lives of seemingly conventional Americans. ``Lott writes cleanly, precisely and with imagination. Yet most of these tales are dismayingly Continue reading »

Ralph Lombreglia

``Inn Essence,'' the tale of a young American salad chef among a group of Thai waiters, is the highlight of this collection; other standouts include ``Purification,'' in which a fishing trip becomes Continue reading »

Patricia Griffith

This graceful novel of small-town-Texas eccentricity focuses on a local newspaper's temporary editor. Continue reading »

Darcey Steinke

North Carolina's Ocracoke Island is the setting of this intriguing and poetic novel focusing on Emily, who leaves her longtime lover for a newcomer to the community, and on her 16-year-old son, Continue reading »

Barbara Gowdy

After opening on the 1969 funeral of a woman who fell or leaped from a rooftop, this narrative shifts to the 1950s; through her three daughters, we learn that she is an alcoholic who once dropped or Continue reading »

Cathie Pelletier

Boisterous, tacky and opportunistic residents of Mattagash, Maine, prepare for the unlikely wedding of Amy Jo Lawler, descendant of their small town's Protestant founder, to a Catholic with Continue reading »

James Gordon Bennett

Siblings Teddy and Cora--who grew up in a squabbling, peripatetic Army major's family--learn that their elusive, recently widowed father has married an Asian woman with whom he has been involved Continue reading »

David Bottoms

Carl Holtzclaw and his brother, a failed boxer, botch the kidnapping of a rich college student when a local gangster tries to collect on one of Carl's bad gambling debts. According to PW , scenes of Continue reading »

David Grossman

In this unforgettable work, Israeli writer Grossman sets a critical juncture in his four narrators' lives against the moral and ethical corrosion of the Israeli occupation. Continue reading »

Martha Graham

The maven of modern dance's only book, dictated in the months just before her death in 1991 at age 96. Continue reading »

Bret Lott, Hernandez

Jewel Hilburn, the strong-willed narrator of this haunting novel set in rural Mississippi, lavishes the parental love she never received upon her own child, who is afflicted with Down's syndrome. Continue reading »

Pam Houston

A gifted storyteller and a fine writer, Houston brings insight and an original perspective to the heavily trafficked gender divide in her short-story collection, which was a two-week PW bestseller in Continue reading »

Michael Malone

In top comedic form, Malone follows a North Carolina English professor's merry chase across the Atlantic after a play of his that has been purloined. Continue reading »

Bret Lott, George Ed. Weber

Heavy-handed symbolism and plenty of repetition ensure that even the least attentive reader will grasp the twin themes of mourning and renewal in Lott's latest effort. Three months after their young Continue reading »

Terry McMillan

McMillan's novel about friendship between four black, thirtysomething Phoenix women was a 29-week PW bestseller. Continue reading »

Elinor Lipman, Lipman

When her live-in lover of 12 years tells her he's marrying someone else, Harriet Mahoney, a writer of unpublished stories ``about love between quiet people'' answers an ad for a ghostwriter. She Continue reading »

Carol Muske-Dukes

Willis Jane Digby, letters editor of a feminist magazine called Sisterhood , can't resist answering her most bizarre correspondents, among them a mental patient, a pervert and ``The Watcher,'' who Continue reading »

James O'Shea

The extent of the S & L disaster--now estimated at $500 billion--continues to grow in impact as the press discloses fresh examples of greed, fraud and incompetence involving accounts, appraisers, Continue reading »

Ronald Munson

Munson's outstanding debut novel presents John Haack, an intelligent, attractive man who leads a double life as Jaguar, a sadistic killer who decapitates his victims. This criminal is especially Continue reading »

Jim Harrison

Four affluent former '60s radicals are called upon to rescue an ex-cohort from a Mexican jail; a hard-drinking diver for an illegal scavenging firm dredges an Indian's body from Lake Superior; a Continue reading »

James O'Shea

O'Shea focuses on entrepreneur Donald Dixon, who purchased a federally insured Vernon, Tex., S & L and used it to fund his reckless ventures and lavish lifestyle. PW called this ``an astute appraisal Continue reading »

Elinor Lipman

In a second novel as enchanting as her first, Lipman ( Then She Found Me ) traces the untriumphant return of 30-year-old Melinda LeBlanc to her recently gentrified hometown of Harrow, Mass., after a Continue reading »

Ronald Munson

Munson's outstanding debut novel--Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates in cloth--presents John Haack, an intelligent, attractive man who leads a double life as a sadistic killer. Continue reading »

Andrew Klavan

Klavan, an Edgar winner who also writes as Keith Peterson, expertly interweaves the disparate worlds of a psychiatrist who takes on the hard cases: catatonics, schizophrenics and the criminally Continue reading »

Cathy N. Davidson

Delightful and insightful, this collection explores the many varietes of love letters. Divided into six parts--from ``Falling in Love'' to ``Absence'' to ``The End of Love''--as well as several Continue reading »

Walter Walker

In his fifth novel, Walker ( A Dime to Dance By ) relates a sprightly and cynical tale of pro basketball and corruption. The book focuses on the fictional San Francisco Golden Gaters, a Continue reading »

Robert Ward

Ward, best known for Cattle Annie and Little Britches but most admired for the somber proletarian novel Red Baker , has worked in Hollywood for years; as with Richard Price, scriptwriting seems not Continue reading »

Andrew Klavan

Maneuvering the plot of his latest urban thriller with the irresistible skill of a three-card monte expert, Klavan leaves his mesmerized readers the winners. In New York City on Halloween morning, Continue reading »

Stephen M. Fried

``Gia'' Marie Carang (1960-1986) hit the fashion world like a storm in the late 1970s, after she was discovered by model agent Wilhelmina Cooper; soon she was pictured on the covers of Vogue and Continue reading »

Walter Walker

Walker's amusing but somewhat convoluted tale of pro basketball and corruption centers on a fictional, struggling basketball franchise and a murdered sports columnist. Continue reading »

Terry Kay

Perhaps destined to become this season's The Bridges of Madison County , this sentimental romance novel by the author of To Dance with the White Dog pulls on the heartstrings as it tells a Continue reading »

Larry Watson, Savedge

Watson's novel about a middle-class Montana family torn apart by scandal during the summer of 1948 was awarded the Milkweed National Fiction Prize. Continue reading »

Fenton Johnson

A novelist and essayist helps his partner face death from AIDS. Continue reading »

The Miracle of Language

Richard Lederer. Pocket Books, $5.99 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-671-70940-2