To open Commas, Common Sense and Justice is to step into a room that has been waiting for you — patient, lamplit, faintly humming with the day's last argument.
Like language itself, punctuation is always in a state of flux — an opinion on commas, the Second Amendment, and judicial interpretation.
The prose moves like weather. Sentences gather, break, gather again. What looks at first like restraint is, on closer reading, a kind of generosity — the writer trusting the reader to feel the storm without being shown the lightning.
A Letter, Long Withheld
Plot, in the conventional sense, is almost beside the point. What propels the pages is closer to attention — the writer's, then ours — turning over the ordinary until it gives up its odd, persistent light.
“There is no false note here, only a writer working at the full reach of her instrument.”
Plot, in the conventional sense, is almost beside the point. What propels the pages is closer to attention — the writer's, then ours — turning over the ordinary until it gives up its odd, persistent light.
There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.
A Letter, Long Withheld
Plot, in the conventional sense, is almost beside the point. What propels the pages is closer to attention — the writer's, then ours — turning over the ordinary until it gives up its odd, persistent light.
It would be wrong to call Commas, Common Sense and Justice flawless. It is something better than that: alive.