Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashbook of Style, a Beastly Guide Through the Writer's Labyrinth [Hardcover]

Karen Elizabeth Gordon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 28, 1997

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, in this engaging, Gothic, quick-fix handbook--an ideal complement to The Deluxe Transitive Vampire--playfully instructs her readers about grammar and style as she plunges them into her magical world teeming with a wildly imaginative menagerie of winged and terrestrial creatures. Six eccentric fictional authorities, including sex-changing Natty Ampersand and Medievalist Vargas Scronx, give the book a sense of send-up in addition to its trusty practicality. A farouche faun with cloven hoofs, black rats, sirens and sphinxes, turbaned serpents, dragons, brigands and a butler make their appearance in unforgettable sentences and imaginary landscapes, such as brooding Trajikistan, to beguile the reader through such confusions and corrections as dangling and misplaced modifiers, double negatives, parallel construction, and a voluptuous riot of word abuses and preferable usage.

Gordon also tames such confusing grammatical beasts as the elliptical clause, split infinitives, and many more. Rikki Ducornet has drawn more than fifty whimsical illustrations that capture the eccentric spirit of the text.

Torn Wings and Faux Pas makes the reader laugh  out loud and shiver with pleasure while experiencing style, vocabulary, and the structures of language as a perpetual and fiendish delight.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The author of The Deluxe Transitive Vampire and The New Well-Tempered Sentence returns with a styleguide for the gothic set, featuring a cast of feathered duchesses, baby dragons, and lascivious banditti. As always, Karen Elizabeth Gordon's sample sentences are beguiling enough to distract even the staunchest logophile from the matter at hand. Nonetheless, she manages to tidily dispose of some of the English language's most ancient and troublesome dilemmas, from the difference between "affect" and "effect" to the intricacies of the split-infinitive debate. Enhanced by the tiny, whimsical line drawings of Rikki Ducornet, this is one styleguide you just might read like a novel.

Review

... surely the steamiest stylebook ever to sit on a reference shelf... Gordon's advice about grammar and usage is sound, and just look at the fun she has righting misplaced modifiers, dispelling confusion about spelling and, most important, showing how syntactical precision makes for better writing.... The real problem with this sensuous yet sensible stylebook is the happy risk that readers who consult it may be lured into the labyrinth of Gordon's witty imagination and forget what they were looking up in the first place. -- Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Martha Barnette

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 204 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st edition (October 28, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679442421
• ISBN-13: 978-0679442424
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #939,861 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a tapestry of syntax, July 13, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashbook of Style, a Beastly Guide Through the Writer's Labyrinth (Hardcover)

To those who know, good grammar is sensual; to Karen Elizabeth Gordon, who stitches a Bayeux tapestry of medieval creatures and other amiable schoolgirl romanticisms into her symposia on various grammatical topics, good grammar is not only sensual, it is also downright gothic. I understand the marriage; it must seem to lovers of English that well-constructed sentences are as difficult to extract from the linguistic detritus of today's world as Excalibur was from the stone of another. Perhaps the kindest thing one can say about a book is that one would like to have breakfast with the author; and midway through, I wondered what it would be like to meet Ms. Gordon over crepes and coffee and Le Figaro, and ask her to render an opinion on the American practice of turning nouns into verbs. The only problem with beautiful and idiosyncratic books on grammar is that they are only read by people who are least in need of such books, and forever remain unread by those most in ne! ! ed of them.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A book of English language usage, January 5, 2003

By 

Jeffrey Leeper "kem2070" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashbook of Style, a Beastly Guide Through the Writer's Labyrinth (Hardcover)

Welcome once again to the world of Karen Elizabeth Gordon. Here, lycanthropes, vampires, and cartographers explore places like Bosoxia or party in the Schloss. Provided the vocabulary used for the examples does not discourage you from reading, this book is an entertaining way to explore the many commonly confused words of the English language.

As with other books by Gordon, this is a handy reference to have, but it is not a quick reference. Then entries are alphabetically listed, but you would have to search to find what you need. Unlike other of her books, this one does not have the detailed illustrations. This is a little disappointing, but it is still a helpful book.

The "Deluxe Transitive Vampire" and the "New Well-Tempered Sentence" are mentioned in the text in a few places. Having all three on your desk would make writing a more productive and witty endeavor. Referring to this book will help improve your writing. I would recommend it if the examples don't scare you off.