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9781350473096

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""Ira Nadel's study of the American sentence is wide-ranging, historically accurate, and above all, so interesting one thinks of the adjective fascinating."" --Linda Wagner-Martin, Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English & Comparative Literature Emerita, The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA ""With wit, style and learning, Ira Nadel has produced a biography of the American sentence, from its infancy in the Puritan sermon to its complex adulthood in contemporary novels, screenwriting and the smartphone. This book is a quest for the sentence as it has been nurtured in America, for its moralistic passion, its sinewy strength, its plain-talking precision. Along the way, the reader is treated to familiar and surprising examples from many writers, each insightfully framed and explained. Why do Gertrude Stein's sentences contain both unparaphrasable mystery and grammatical precision? Why did Allen Ginsberg adopt the Japanese haiku as a model for his prose poems? How did Ralph Ellison shape vernacular speech in complex sentences that rival those of William Faulkner? Nadel's ear for style and his fluent analysis make this book a delight to learn from."" --Robert Spoo, Professor of English, Princeton University, USA ""An endlessly enjoyable meditation on the anatomy of the American sentence in American fiction. Approachable and absorbing from start to finish. Learned, quotable and memorable. Whether you are writing your first sentence of fiction or reading and critiquing the latest work of fiction by others, you'll learn why sentences are the arteries of thought circulating through all kinds of writing, on the page and now online."" --Michael Earley, Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge, UK

Author Information

Ira Nadel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a UBC Distinguished University Scholar and a winner of the Medal for Canadian Biography. Based at the University of British Columbia, he has lectured throughout Europe, North America and Asia. His works include Love and Russian Literature: From Benjamin to Woolf (2024), Philip Roth: A Counterlife (2021), Virginia Woolf (Critical Lives) (2016), Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard (2002), and Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (1996).

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