“Dictionary Stories brings to literature the spirit of the musical mashup, digging in the crates to find old hooks and arrange them into new delights. This book reminds us: it’s all there, love and disappointment and deep humor, latent in our language and its storehouses; it just takes a keen eye to connect the dots. Jez Burrows is keen indeed.”
—Robin Sloan, New York Times bestselling author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
“The dictionary is not a place that you expect to find the stuff of romance, poignancy, belly laughs, or drama—unless you’re Jez Burrows. He makes those flat samples of words in use shine and sparkle, knotting them together into vignettes that make you laugh, cry, gasp—vignettes that make language as personal as your own fingerprint. I write dictionaries, and I’ll never look at their example sentences the same way again.
Dictionary Stories isn’t just a book for word nerds, but for anyone for whom language and story matter. Everybody, A-Z, will find themselves thoroughly in love with this book.”
—Kory Stamper, lexicographer and editor for Merriam-Webster, and author of Word by Word
“Jez has long been one of my favorite illustrators, and now he comes up with Dictionary Stories—sentences stolen from dictionaries and pasted together into tiny, delightful narratives. A brilliant literary remix.”
—Austin Kleon, New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist
“Until you read Dictionary Stories, you’ll never understand just how weird the dictionary really is. Jez Burrows’s Dictionary Stories is all of human emotion and experience, handily arranged in alphabetical order.”
—Erin McKean, former editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary and founder of Wordnik
“The very definition of a folly. Impractical, foolish, and (possibly) unprofitable . . . yet brilliantly, brazenly fun. Like a cabaret for word lovers.”
—Sean Michaels, author of Giller Prize–winning novel, Us Conductors
“Burrows has a talent for a delightfully askew existentialism. . . . The stories are wickedly short but exquisitely rendered, accompanied by whimsical, minimalist illustrations by the author. A fabulist remix of the English language and a tribute to clever lexicographers everywhere.”
—Kirkus Reviews