© Columbia University Press
The Novelist’s Lexicon: Writers on the Words That Define Their Work
October, 2010
Cloth, 168 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-15080-4
$16.95
/ £11.95
"Enlightening and enjoyable." — World Literature Today
"These authors represent an impressive range of nationalities, making their book a very good read. The essays are consistently well-written, playful, intelligent, engaging. They are so varied in their approaches and offer such distinct voices that, oddly for a lexicon, the book is something of a page turner. The reader is always curious to see what comes next. All the pieces provide interesting perspective on the workings of the novelist’s mind(s)." — Jody Gladding, poet, translator, and author of Rooms and Their Airs
"This could be the beginning of a new literary genre—a collective, global genre, uniquely a product of our time. In it, writers, like participants in a reality TV show, find themselves forced to perform not in isolation (as they do in their own books) but as part of a group, against which they'll be instantly measured. This is a new kind of literary globalization, in which French and English mingle freely with Arabic, Vietnamese, Spanish, and every other language in the world. Each entry is strong and memorable, but what matters most is the sheer variety of approaches, the way each writer so fully defines him or herself, his or her idea of literature, in just a few lines, as well as the astonishing number of new names joined by more familiar ones. This bold experiment in taking the bull of literary globalization by the horns constitutes an important document of intensive, ongoing contact between all languages and all literatures." — Esther Allen, codirector, PEN World Voices