The Liar's Dictionary

The Liar's Dictionary
Author: Eley Williams
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385546785

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “You wouldn’t expect a comic novel about a dictionary to be a thriller too, but this one is. In fact, [it] is also a mystery, love story (two of them) and cliffhanging melodrama.” —The New York Times Book Review An award-winning novel that chronicles the charming misadventures of a lovelorn Victorian lexicographer and the young woman put on his trail a century later to root out his misdeeds while confronting questions of her own sexuality and place in the world. Mountweazel n. the phenomenon of false entries within dictionaries and works of reference. Often used as a safeguard against copyright infringement. In the final year of the nineteenth century, Peter Winceworth is toiling away at the letter S for Swansby’s multivolume Encyclopaedic Dictionary. But his disaffection with his colleagues compels him to assert some individual purpose and artistic freedom, and he begins inserting unauthorized, fictitious entries. In the present day, Mallory, the publisher’s young intern, starts to uncover these mountweazels in the process of digitization and through them senses their creator’s motivations, hopes, and desires. More pressingly, she’s also been contending with a threatening, anonymous caller who wants Swansby’s staff to “burn in hell.” As these two narratives coalesce, Winceworth and Mallory, separated by one hundred years, must discover how to negotiate the complexities of life’s often untrustworthy, hoax-strewn, and undefinable path. An exhilarating, laugh-out-loud debut, The Liar’s Dictionary celebrates the rigidity, fragility, absurdity, and joy of language while peering into questions of identity and finding one’s place in the world.

All Men Are Liars

All Men Are Liars
Author: Alberto Manguel
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2012-06-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101574895

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In this gorgeously imagined novel, a journalist interviews those who knew—or thought they knew—Alejandro Bevilacqua, a brilliant, infuriatingly elusive South American writer and author of the masterpiece, In Praise of Lying. But the accounts of those in his circle of friends, lovers, and enemies become increasingly contradictory, murky, and suspect. Is everyone lying, or just telling their own subjective version of the truth? As the literary investigation unfolds and a chorus of Bevilacqua’s peers piece together the fractured reality of his life, thirty years after his death, only the reader holds the power of final judgment. In All Men Are Liars, Alberto Manguel pays homage to literature’s inventions and explores whether we can ever truly know someone, and the question of how, by whom, and for what, we ourselves will be remembered.

Sleeping with the Dictionary

Sleeping with the Dictionary
Author: Harryette Mullen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 99
Release: 2002-02-22
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0520927834

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Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation--which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"--also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse. Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "licked all over by the English tongue," and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "pillow dictionary."

Weasel Words

Weasel Words
Author: Paul Wasserman
Publisher: Capital Books
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781933102078

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With more than 1,200 terms, this A to Z dictionary is a hard-hitting, politically savvy translation of all those evasions, put-on-holds, distortions, circumventions, obfuscations, and misleading terms used by government, businesses, and the media.

Attrib. and Other Stories

Attrib. and Other Stories
Author: Eley Williams
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 107
Release: 2021-05-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593312368

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"It's just the real inexplicable gorgeous brilliant thing this book. I love it in a way I usually reserve for people." --Max Porter A dazzling, prizewinning short story collection that showcases a bold new talent Eley Williams has been a literary sensation ever since this collection of experimental short fiction was published in the UK. Lauded as "elegant" (The Guardian) and "exhilarating" (Vanity Fair), Attrib. and Other Stories won the James Tait Black Prize, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and was named a best book of the year by The Guardian. Attrib. presents a cast of unforgettable characters standing at the precipice of emotional events (a disastrous breakup, a successful date, an unexpected arrival) and finding it fiendishly impossible to express themselves. With intimate, irreverent, and playful prose, Eley Williams rejoices in both the possibilities and limitations of language, as well as the very human need to be known and understood--despite our own best efforts. Original and inventive in the vein of Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, and Amy Hempel, these stories are "emotionally delicate and tenderly introspective" (New Statesman) and "an absolute must-read" (The London Magazine).

On Bullshit

On Bullshit
Author: Harry G. Frankfurt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2009-01-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1400826535

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The #1 New York Times bestseller that explains why bullshit is far more dangerous than lying One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory." Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

The Warlow Experiment

The Warlow Experiment
Author: Alix Nathan
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2020-07-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1984897802

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Named one of the best books of 2019 by the Daily Mail, The Sunday Times (London), and the BBC An utterly transporting and original historical novel about an eighteenth-century experiment in personal isolation that yields unexpected--and deeply, shatteringly human--results. "The best kind of historical fiction. Alix Nathan is an original, with a virtuoso touch." --Hilary Mantel Herbert Powyss lives in an estate in the Welsh Marches, with enough time and income to pursue a gentleman's fashionable investigations and experiments in botany. But he longs to make his mark in the field of science--something consequential enough to present to the Royal Society in London. He hits on a radical experiment in isolation: For seven years a subject will inhabit three rooms in the basement of the manor house, fitted out with rugs, books, paintings, and even a chamber organ. Meals will arrive thrice daily via a dumbwaiter. The solitude will be totally unrelieved by any social contact whatsoever; the subject will keep a diary of his daily thoughts and actions. The pay: fifty pounds per annum, for life. Only one man is desperate to apply for the job: John Warlow, a semi-literate laborer with a wife and six children to provide for. The experiment, a classic Enlightenment exercise gone more than a little mad, will have unforeseen consequences for all included.

Spinglish

Spinglish
Author: Henry Beard
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2015-06-02
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 0399172394

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Spinglish—the devious dialect of English used by professional spin doctors—is all around us. And the fact is, until you’ve mastered it, politicians and corporations (not to mention your colleagues and friends) will continue putting things over on you, and generally getting the better of you, every minute of every day—without your even knowing it. However, once you perfect the art of terminological inexactitude, you’ll be the one manipulating and one-upping everyone else! And here’s the beauty part: Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, authors of the New York Times semi-bestseller The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook, have compiled this handy yet astonishingly comprehensive lexicon and translation guide—a fictionary, if you will—to help you do just that. If you want to succeed in business (or politics, sports, the arts, or life in general) without really lying, this is the book for you! (Your results may vary.) Spinglish includes these nifty bits of spurious verbiage and over a thousand more: aesthetic procedure – face-lift dairy nutrients – cow manure enhanced interrogation techniques – torture “For your convenience.” – “For our convenience.” hands-on mentoring – sexual relations with a junior employee incomplete success – failure rightsizing – firing people zero-tasking – doing nothing With each and every entry sourced from some of the greatest real-life language benders in the world today, you’re virtually guaranteed to have the perfectly chosen tried-and-untrue term right at the tip of your forked tongue. Wish you could nimbly sidestep a question without batting an eye? Not sure how to apologize while also . . . not apologizing? Spinglish has you covered. Simply consult this convenient, shoot-from-the-lip glossary, and before you know it, you’ll be telling it like it isn’t, it wasn’t, and it couldn’t ever have been.

The Devil's Dictionary (or The Cynic's Wordbook: Unabridged with all the Definitions)

The Devil's Dictionary (or The Cynic's Wordbook: Unabridged with all the Definitions)
Author: Ambrose Bierce
Publisher: e-artnow
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2013-08-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 8074843955

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This carefully crafted ebook: "The Devil's Dictionary (or The Cynic's Wordbook: Unabridged with all the Definitions)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. The book is a classic satire in the form of a dictionary on which Bierce worked for decades. It was originally published in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book before being retitled in 1911. A number of the definitions are accompanied by satiric verses, many of which are signed with comic pseudonyms. It offers reinterpretations of terms in the English language which lampoon cant and political double-talk as well as other aspects of human foolishness and frailty. The definitions provide satirical, witty and often politically pointed representations of the words that is seeks to "define". The Devil's Dictionary has inspired many imitations both in its day and more recently. Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842 – 1914?) was an American satirist, critic, poet, editor and journalist. Bierce became a prolific author of short stories often humorous and sometimes bitter or macabre. His dark, sardonic views and vehemence as a critic earned him the nickname, "Bitter Bierce".

The Truth App

The Truth App
Author: Jack Heath
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1534449884

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“A swift, intense page-turner.” —BCCB In this pulse-pounding tech-thriller, Jack Heath creates a world where everyone knows when you lie—and telling the truth doesn’t always set you free. Jarli likes to think he’s an honest guy. He’s a big believer in telling the truth, no matter what. So he develops The Truth App, a mobile application that listens in on your conversations and can tell when someone’s lying. Then his app goes viral and, suddenly, Jarli is an internet sensation. But, soon enough, Jarli realizes that being famous can be dangerous—especially when you’ve just exposed everyone’s deepest, darkest secrets. Now his entire town is out to get him: kids at school, teachers, the police, even his own family. Also, an underground network of criminals has just added Jarli to their hit list. Sometimes, exposing the truth comes with a price…