Download or read book Torn Wings and Faux Pas written by Karen Elizabeth Gordon and published by Random House Value Pub. This book was released on 1998-12-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karen Elizabeth Gordon, in this engaging, Gothic, quick-fix handbook--an ideal complement to The Deluxe Transitive Vampire--playfully instructs her readers about grammar and style as she plunges them into her magical world teeming with a wildly imaginative menagerie of winged and terrestrial creatures. Six eccentric fictional authorities, including sex-changing Natty Ampersand and Medievalist Vargas Scronx, give the book a sense of send-up in addition to its trusty practicality. A farouche faun with cloven hoofs, black rats, sirens and sphinxes, turbaned serpents, dragons, brigands and a butler make their appearance in unforgettable sentences and imaginary landscapes, such as brooding Trajikistan, to beguile the reader through such confusions and corrections as dangling and misplaced modifiers, double negatives, parallel construction, and a voluptuous riot of word abuses and preferable usage. Gordon also tames such confusing grammatical beasts as the elliptical clause, split infinitives, and many more. Rikki Ducornet has drawn more than fifty whimsical illustrations that capture the eccentric spirit of the text. Torn Wings and Faux Pas makes the reader laugh out loud and shiver with pleasure while experiencing style, vocabulary, and the structures of language as a perpetual and fiendish delight.