News that the DOJ had approved the merger of Random House and Penguin yesterday was easy to miss… Read more »

A copyeditor, or proofreader, reading the headline above, would need to pause — if he or she has even an average awareness of the flotsam of American culture, the one… Read more »

There’s a long tradition of scathing notes sent by writers to proofreaders and copy editors. Raymond Chandler, writing to a copy editor at the Atlantic Monthly in 1947, told her… Read more »

That loud, nasal, and somewhat raspy air-suck sound you heard this afternoon was the noise made by the collectively inhaled breaths of nerds all over the planet Earth. The p.r.… 4 / Read more »

  Our series featuring the intoxicating language of Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama draws to a close. For the last time, we present you with one of the weird and wonderful English… Read more »

Yet again we are exploring the rich language and varied references that make Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama a novel of such layered delights. Today Valtat discusses the significance of the most… Read more »

We return to Jean-Christophe Valtat’s exotic and enchanting vocabulary in his novel Aurorarama, a vocabulary that often led our copy-editor to reach for her dictionary in confusion. theophany: a visible… 2 / Read more »

Once again, we turn to some of the marvelous and obscure language contained in Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama that baffled our poor copy-editor. hypnagogic: Of or relating to the state immediately… Read more »

When we first sent Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama to the copy editor the manuscript came back with a number of flagged words. Williwaw? Demiurge? Picnoleptic? They didn’t appear in the copy… Read more »