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Author and New Yorker Copy Editor Mary Norris Discusses Her Book "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen"

When

Sunday May 15, 2016: 2:00pm to 3:30pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Description

Mary Norris began her professional career as a foot checker—dutifully checking patrons’ toes for athlete’s foot as they entered a Cleveland city pool—before working at a costume company and driving a milk truck.

These were humble beginnings for a woman who would come to spend more than three decades as a copy editor (or “prose goddess”) at The New Yorker, where she’s worked with such celebrated writers as Philip Roth, Pauline Kael, and George Saunders.

Norris’s love of language, and her wish to help “all of you who want to feel better about your grammar,” led her to write Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen a hilarious, down-to-earth manual for untangling the most vexing spelling, punctuation, and usage quandaries in English.

Drawing on wide-ranging and hilariously rendered examples (from Henry James, Emily Dickinson, and James Salter to The Girl from Ipanema, Moby-Dick, and The Simpsons), Norris expertly guides readers through the most common and confusing grammatical issues. Although she is irreverent and blunt, Norris is never snarky or snooty in her grammatical advice. Throughout "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen," Norris acknowledges the subjectivity of her work and advises readers to take a similar hands-on, case-by-case approach to language: “The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can’t let it push you around.”

Join us for a truly delightful afternoon event as Mary Norris discusses her critically-acclaimed book and her life as a ‘comma queen.’ Books will be for sale at this event, courtesy of Literati Bookstore, and the event will include a book signing.

Photo Credit: Josef Astor

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