Helen DeWitt Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Helen DeWitt

Shelley's strategy, adopted from the Doctor, was to write to well-known authorities on religious or philosophical questions, posing as a distressed spinster, puzzled curate or other intellectual innocent. Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit p 26

Helen DeWitt

(Charles Rosen has a long discussion of the middle pedal, I think in Piano Notes) After my mother died on Aug 23 I tried to think of pieces for the memorial service. Could not bring myself to propose this piece,

Helen DeWitt

Tempting to add to a neverending thread, but no. The quote I wanted for the cover of Lightning Rods was: LIGHTNING RODS! I HATE THAT BOOK!!! Mary DeWitt Griffin (Helen's Mom) Totally unsolicited, btw, so trustworthy! Publishers strangely unkeen.

Helen DeWitt

Sraffa made some Neapolitan gesture of disdain and asked, 'What is the logical form of this?' In intro to The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle (Waismann, transcribed, edited, intro Gordon Baker, transl. Baker, Mackert, Connolly, Politis)

Helen DeWitt

I'm rereading Mark Girouard's Life in the English Country House & am shocked to find that it is apparently out of print. Went back to it bc I was thinking how glorious it is to get maybe 1 non-spam email a day, to have 2 inboxes kept at 0 since New Year, 1 w 4 pre-2020 to answer

Out of stock

Helen DeWitt

Sraffa made some Neapolitan gesture of disdain and asked, 'What is the logical form of this?' In intro to The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle (Waismann, transcribed, edited, intro Gordon Baker, transl. Baker, Mackert, Connolly, Politis)

Helen DeWitt

@john_self Almost certainly not, but I never know whether I would agree with the fixes. So many are proposed by people whose views on language seem to be shaped by style manuals rather than, say, @LanguageLog or Anne Curzan's splendid Fixing English.

Helen DeWitt

Excellent news, Elena Devos has sent galleys of Russian translation (w extra stories) of Some Trick, which she translated. I wrote to Lena twice warning of pitfalls of getting Hebrew into typesetting software, & sure enough some of the words got flipped from R->L to L->R!

Helen DeWitt

@CalMorgan Diego Garcia by Natasha Soubramanian & Luke Williams is coming out in June (@FitzcarraldoEds & @SemiotextePress ) (inside baseball, maybe, but it does amazing things w pronouns)