‘I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son,’ Gibbon wrote. But his spendthrift father had depleted the family’s resources so much that he told Gibbon not to. As a young man, Gibbon fell in love and asked permission of his father to marry. The sentences of Gibbon that I love most come from his memoirs, which exist in a host of drafts braided together for publication after his death. It is propelled forward by the momentum of clauses piling on top of one another.Įdward Gibbon is one of 18th century Britain’s other great prose stylists. The sentence is elevated in its diction, but it is also motivated by an ironic sense of the vanity of human wishes. We have to train ourselves to read complex sentences like this one, but if it’s read properly out loud by an actor or someone else who understands the way the subordination of clauses works, it may well be taken in more easily through the ear: When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation. Here’s an elaborate, Latinate favourite, from Samuel Johnson’s preface to his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). A sentence must have a certain distinction of style – the words come in an order that couldn’t have been assembled by any other writer. A great sentence compels you to rehearse it again in your mind’s ear, and then again later on. Thursday, May 9th: Mockingbird Hill Cottageįriday, May 10th: Reviews by Elizabeth A.A great sentence makes you want to chew it over slowly in your mouth the first time you read it. Sunday, May 5th: Hopelessly Devoted Bibliophile Wednesday, April 17th: Books a la Mode – guest post and giveaway Thursday, April 11th: Sweet Southern Home Monday, April 8th: Reading on a Rainy Day Jenny Davidson’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS: She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and blogs at Light Reading. She is the author of the novel Heredity (2003) two YA novels, The Explosionist (2008) and Invisible Things (2010) and several academic books. Jenny Davidson is a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. James’s gripping storytelling, and you’d have the tone and flavor of Davidson’s novel.” -Ken Bruen, author of The Hackman Blues and The Guards About Jenny Davidson “Imagine Irish Murdoch, channeling Janet Evanovich and cribbing the sheer art of P.D. Sara Gran, author of Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead “Like a novel by a 21 st-century Muriel Spark, this book about smart women, dangerous games, and the roles we play in life enthralled me. “Elegant, brutally smart, and utterly absorbing- The Secret History as directed by Whit Stillman.” -Megan Abbott, author of Dare Me “Davidson deftly orchestrates a startling collision between the classical and the contemporary, reality and play.” - Kirkus Reviews THE MAGIC CIRCLE delves into the sociology of live-action role-playing and highlights the fine line between gaming and real life. When Anna’s seductive brother Anders gets involved and introduces “LARP”ing (live-action role-playing), their ideas become reality and the game goes from thrilling to terrifying.ĭavidson’s state-of-the-art narrative structure includes blog posts, text messages, and Gchats-mixing contemporary culture with the enduring drama of The Bacchae. In Euripides’ classic play, a young man, Pentheus, denies the divinity of the god Dionysus and pays a high price for asserting the values of reason over passion. Roommates Ruth and Lucy join forces with their mysterious Swedish neighbor Anna to develop an immersive game based on The Bacchae. From Grant’s Tomb to the insane asylum that once stood where the campus is now, the chilling past makes Morningside Heights the perfect setting for their daring games. With New York City as their playground, they design games based on the secret history of the neighborhood around Columbia University. Lucy, Ruth, and Anna are academics who study the culture of gaming. In the genre-bending literary thriller THE MAGIC CIRCLE, by Columbia University professor Jenny Davidson (Amazon Publishing/New Harvest, on sale March 26, 2013), three young women invent a live-action role-playing game that goes terribly awry. Three young female academics design daring, boundary-pushing games -until one of them goes too far, in this contemporary thriller by an acclaimed Columbia University professor Publisher: New Harvest 1 edition (March 26, 2013).
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