On Point producer Stefano Kotsonis joined The New Yorker's Mary Norris for a conversation about her latest book, "Greek To Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen."
Mary Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978 and was a query proofreader at the magazine for twenty-four years. She has written for The Talk of the Town and for newyorker.com, on topics ranging from her cousin Dennis Kucinich to mud wrestling in Rockaway. She is best known for her pieces on pencils and punctuation. She is also the author of “Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.”
About "Greek To Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen"
The Comma Queen returns with a buoyant book about language, love and the wine-dark sea.
In her New York Times bestseller "Between You & Me," Mary Norris delighted readers with her irreverent tales of pencils and punctuation in The New Yorker’s celebrated copy department. In "Greek to Me," she delivers another wise and funny paean to the art of self-expression, this time filtered through her greatest passion: all things Greek.
"Greek to Me" is a charming account of Norris’s lifelong love affair with words and her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, goes searching for the fabled Baths of Aphrodite, and reveals the surprising ways Greek helped form English. Filled with Norris’s memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine―and more than a few Greek men―"Greek to Me" is the Comma Queen’s fresh take on Greece and the exotic yet strangely familiar language that so deeply influences our own.