Eunoia
Christian Bok
Available as Paperback
A wonderful gift book for word freaks, scrabble nuts, and crossword fans everywhere…
‘Eunoia’, which means ‘beautiful thinking’, is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels. This book also contains them all, except that each one appears by itself in its own chapter. A unique personality for each vowel soon emerges: A is courtly, E is elegiac, I is lyrical, O is jocular, U is obscene. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, Eunoia is as playful as it is awe-inspiring.
“Christian Bok’s dazzling word games are the literary sensation of the year.”
the Times
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“Extraordinary, outrageous, irresistible - a must for verbivores.”
Gyles Brandreth
“A book that is easy, and pleasurable, to read. Eunoia is characterized not by obvious sweat and strain, but by playfulness, fluidity and self-conscious wit … At other times, the rhythms bounce and tumble, creating an impression of haste despite the meticulousness and graft of the book’s composition …The book’s freshest insights pertain to the resilience and manipulability of language.”
irish Times
“No mere Christmas stocking filler for Countdown fans. Rather, it’s an ingenious little novel … playful and irreverent … charming.”
metro
“Amazing … impressive … It’s beautiful, it’s funny and it’s moving.”
globe And Mail
Christian Bok
Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopaedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best Poetic Debut. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. He lives in Toronto.