Lynne Truss debuted in America as a guffaw-inducing
grammarian, but her British audience has known her for years as
a critically acclaimed novelist and columnist. Her previous works
are now available stateside in one volume, complete with a new
preface.
With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed, a raucous comedy of errors, follows
the exploits of Osborne Lonsdale, who writes a weekly column called "Me
and My Shed" for a floundering gardening magazine. When the
publication is taken over by a gung-ho management team, Lonsdale
must learn to cope with his new coworkers.
In Tennyson's Gift and Going Loco, Truss turns a fiendishly clever
eye to the literary world. Tennyson's Gift is an imaginative cocktail
of Victorian seriousness and farce that re-imagines the world of
the nineteenth-century English poet laureate, placing him in the
midst of eccentric company that includes dodgy Charles Dodgson (aka
Lewis Carroll). Going Loco features a critic trying to write a definitive
account of the doppelgänger in gothic fiction, amidst the chaos
of her domestic life, including paranoia that her cleaning lady is
taking over her life.
Making the Cat Laugh is a riotous collection of columns about single
life. Truss comments on dating, secondhand smoking, shopping, holidays,
and people who ask, "How's the novel going?" All the while,
she continues an eighteen-year quest to make her cat laugh. Reportedly,
the feline remains unimpressed.
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