My stepdaughter, A., continual bringer of joy, turns eighteen years old today. A few of you have been reading about her since the days of the beautifully and artfully burned pancakes, the puppet Wikipedia, and the giraffe in the wineglass, since The Gashlycrumb Tinies debacle, the Mythic Creatures disappointment, and the Hurricane Charley near-miss. You’ve suggested books for her and . . .
At The Awl, I take a look — a completely unscientific but obsessive look — at some of the ways people are talking about and using slang on Twitter. And, coincidentally, for Sunday’s New York Times, Ben Zimmer considers how linguists, sociologists, and psychologists are mining the medium for clues to real-time language use.
I reviewed Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, which I enjoyed but had hoped and expected to admire more than I did. Here’s an excerpt. Jeffrey Eugenides has always sought to infuse his fiction with the pleasures of “old-fashioned” storytelling. He strives for a “Classical shape,” a “pleasing and elegant form,” for “something that seizes you, that grabs your attention and . . .
“For the young — and especially the young writer — memory and imagination are quite distinct, and of different categories. In a typical first novel, there will be moments of unmediated memory (typically, that unforgettable sexual embarrassment), moments where the imagination has worked to transfigure a memory (perhaps that chapter in which the protagonist learns some lesson about life, whereas . . .