Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

Description

A legendary New Yorker copy editor's endlessly enjoyable life lessons in spelling and punctuation, grammar and usage. (And pencils.) 'Enlightening, useful, and often outright hilarious...From exclamation marks to emoticons, swear words to split infinitives, Mary Norris is the bomb.' Australian Women's Weekly 'What is immediately beguiling about Between You & Me- Confessions of a Comma Queen is the extraordinary amount of ground Norris covers...She is wise, funny, precise and knowledgeable.' Sydney Morning Herald 'This book is so much fun to read. Get it and revel in the delights and conundrums of a life spent amid words.' Good Reading 'So warm and un-fusty that the pages just slip by. Yet it manages in its final few to sneak in thoughtful discussions of, among other disputes, swearing, commas, colons and semicolons.' Listener 'Very funny, lucid, and lively.' New Republic 'Hilarious...Between You & Me charmed my socks off.' New York Times Book Review 'Down-to-earth memoir interwoven with idiosyncratic, often funny ruminations on the nuts and bolts of language.' Boston Globe

Mary Norris began working at the New Yorker in 1978. Originally from Cleveland, she now lives in New York. This is her first book. Her favourite pencil used to be the Dixon Ticonderoga No. 1, but she now makes do with the Palomino Blackwing.

'A delightful mix of autobiographer, New Yorker lore, and good language sense.' -- Ben Yagoda '[The] verbal diagnostician I would turn to for a first, second, or third opinion on just about anything.' -- John McPhee New Yorker 'Countless laugh-out-loud passages...A funny book for any serious reader.' Kirkus 'Mary Norris is a grammar geek with a streak of mischief, and her book is obscenely fun.' -- Marilyn Johnson 'Between You & Me is as entertaining as grammar can be. Very very. Read it and savor it.' -- Garrison Keillor 'Marvelous...Mary Norris is no dry guardian of grammar, no punitive Poobah of punctuation. In giving an account of her journey from provincial obscurity to the glamour of New York-and the New Yorker-she offers a warm, tender, and funny coming of age story. (Or possibly it's a 'coming-of-age' story. Mary could tell you!)' -- Rebecca Mead 'Mary Norris's Between You & Me is so smart and funny and soulful and effortlessly illuminating. Well, she herself is so generous and great-what else would she do?' -- Ian Frazier 'Mary Norris brings a tough-minded, clear-eyed, fine-tuned wisdom to all the perplexities and traps and terrors of the English sentence.' -- Adam Gopnik 'Very funny, lucid, and lively...[Norris'] love of language transcends all, reconnecting the alienated pieces of this world-from the micromachinery of the serial comma up to the cosmic mystery of story.' New Republic 'I enjoyed Mary Norris's book so much. It's exactly my idea of a good read.' Kate Grenville, in correspondence 'This book charmed my socks off...Norris is a master storyteller.' New York Times 'Informative, witty and very funny: a must for anyone who cares about what they write.' BookMooch 'If you loved Eats Shoots and Leaves you will ADORE this marvellously intelligent and witty disquisition on the finer points of punctuation and grammar.' Booktopia Buzz 'This enchanting little tome is a journey through her world of punctuation and grammar, with some very cool anecdotes...If you like words, language or puzzles, this is the book for you - or that friend or mother who always corrects you.' Readings 'Norris is warm, knowledgable and unapologetically fussy...The pleasure of Between You & Me boils down to a willingness to spend 200 tightly edited pages in Mary Norris's good-natured, wise company.' Guardian 'Her book doesn't subordinate the trivial and emphasize the significant, and the result is a verbal flea market with unexpected treasures...Between You & Me really is a reference book to read for pleasure.' LA Review of Books 'So warm and un-fusty that the pages just slip by. Yet it manages in its final few to sneak in thoughtful discussions of, among other disputes, swearing, commas, colons and semi-colons.' New Zealand Listener 'Enlightening, useful, and often outright hilarious...From exclamation marks to emoticons, swear words to split infinitives, Mary Norris is the bomb.' Australian Women's Weekly