The Logophile’s Orgy

This time Delacorte liked my idea about favorite words of famous people. I had wondered why certain words kept cropping up in my own writing. “Eggplant and Cumquat for example. Were they favorite words? Perhaps. What was John Updike’s favorite word, or Norman Mailer’s?

And so The Logophile’s Orgy was born. Seven Nobel laureates contributed their favorite words to the book, and so did Updike, and Mailer, and Edward Said, and Cynthia Ozick, Margaret Atwood, and dozens of other great writers. So did humorists, and scientists, and thinkers, and Desmond Tutu, and Leni Rifenstahl, and endless others who contributed words, profound, profane, witty and brilliant. If I do say so myself, it was a clever conception and a brilliant result. You owe it to yourself to read it.

A fuller exposition of this book, containing the best of the original with many exciting new additions and a new intro will be published by Marion Street Press in trade paperback under the title Favorite Words of Famous People in May of 2011.