Eley William News Today

It is difficult to overstate just how persuasive a storyteller Pip Williams is after reading The Bookbinder of Jericho.

It is difficult to overstate just how persuasive a storyteller Pip Williams is after reading The Bookbinder of Jericho.

It is difficult to overstate just how persuasive a storyteller Pip Williams is after reading The Bookbinder of Jericho.

People influence dictionaries, and dictionaries influence people

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 ...

Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary is the case file, and mountweazels (made-up dictionary entries) are the crimes against vocabulary. The perpetrator of said crimes and the sleuth sniffing them out are separated by a century but bound together by their mutual employer, London’s Swansby House. And the potential victims? Well, that’s where reading the book—and learning a plethora of pleasurable words, genuine and fake—come in. Williams speaks with BookPage as she walks her dog near ...