Melville House Books

Copy-editor’s dilemma

• The real story behind the Penguin – Random House merger

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

• Fifty Shades of Gray?

  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 »

• Letters to the editor

  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 »

• Please, anything but the serial comma!

  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 »

• The copy-editor’s dilemma #11

    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 »

• The Copy-Editor’s Dilemma #4

  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 »

• The Copy-Editor’s Dilemma #3

  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 »

• The Copy-Editor’s Dilemma #2

  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 »

• The copy-editor’s dilemma #1

  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 »