In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.

When did "please" and "thank you" become passé? When you call a "customer service" number, why does the burden of deciphering the automatic switchboard fall to you (and where are the real people, when you, the customer, need service)? Why do people behave as if public spaces are their own chip-strewn living rooms? Perhaps most importantly, how has it come to be that we are not allowed to object? Call someone out on rude or disrespectful behavior and you're likely to get an "Eff off" or worse. In a recent U.S. survey, 79 percent of adults said that lack of courtesy was a serious problem. For all of those fed up with anti-social behavior and suffering in silence, realize that you are the majority! Talk to the Hand is a colorful call to arms-from the wittiest defender of the civilized world.

Illuminating the comical confusion the lowly comma can cause, this new edition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves uses lively, subversive illustrations to show how misplacing or leaving out a comma can change the meaning of a sentence completely.

This picture book is sure to elicit gales of laughter—and better punctuation—from all who read it.

Full of silly scenes that show how apostrophes make a difference, too, this is another picture book that will elicit bales of laughter and better punctuation from all who read it.

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.

A feast of wit, The Lynne Truss Treasury will delight fans of Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Much of the book is also a vicious but genteel hatchet-job on the cosy British crime thriller's casual snobbery--the escalation of mistaken identities and occasional violence heads off into the darkest of dark comedy. Truss is also capable of being charmingly erotic and rather touching--With One Lousy Packet of Seed has a satirical edge and a humane side that balance it neatly. --Roz Kaveney

The bestselling author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves 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).