Eley Williams’ new novel
The Liars Dictionarytransports readers to and from Victorian-era and modern-day London as it follows erudite protagonist a lexicographer named Peter Winceworth and present-day earnest dictionary intern Mallory on a whimsical adventure with language. In an ode to the book’s historical setting, this month we present a riff on the Martinez, a 19th-century cocktail considered to be a direct precursor to the martini.
Named after one of Winceworth’s delightful linguistic inventions, this version of the classic drink uses London dry gin and an even split of sweet and dry vermouth (also known as making a cocktail “perfect”) to give the usually sweet cocktail a sophisticated bite.
Audrey Lane, the headstrong young heroine of Wedderburn’s high-powered follow-up to
The Milk Chicken Bomb is obsessed with everything about the open road. At 20, Audrey gets her dream job driving a truck around the oil fields not far from Calgary, Alberta. Shortly after, she impulsively runs away from the job and the camp where she’s been staying, and ends up in a gritty Edmonton bar. She talks her way into a job as the driver for a bar band called the Lever Men, with none of them sober enough to drive to their next gig. Along the way, Audrey furthers her cross-country education: lonesome highways, dive bars with names like the Crash Palace (and the unique characters who frequent them), and camaraderie with the four Lever Men, to whom she is both den mother and little sister. Wedderburn then jumps nearly a decade to find Audrey a single mother with a young daughter. After reading about the death of Crash Palace owner Alex Main in a Calgary paper, Audrey reels back into memories
The Liar s Dictionary, by Eley Williams Image: Doubleday
Have you ever caught a Mountweazel? Before reading Eley Williams s beguiling first novel, I d never heard of them. But Williams is an expert. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on them, and then she put her hard-earned knowledge to further good use in
The Liar s Dictionary, which is to word lovers what potato chips are to my husband minus the guilt.
What are these sly creatures? Mountweazels are fake entries deliberately inserted into dictionaries, encyclopedias, or other trustworthy reference works as traps to catch plagiarists and copyright infringements. As their name suggests, they are evasive and weaselly, distantly related to intentionally ambiguous or misleading weasel words. According to Wikipedia (which may well be filled with its fair share of Mountweazels), the term was coined by