Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing

Ben Blatt, a former staff writer for Slate and the Harvard Lampoon, has brought his fun approach to data journalism to topics such as Seinfeld, mapmaking, The Beatles, and Jeopardy! He is also coauthor, with Eric Brewster, of I Don't Care If We Never Get Back.Vikas Adam is a classically trained actor with numerous credits in stage, film, commercials, and television, in addition to his over 100 rec

Amazon Customer said Fascinating, surprising, funny, and page-turning literature analysis book!. I absolutely loved this book! Data meets literature and the results will surprise you. This book had me laughing out loud—both in hysterics and delight. There is so much fun information presented and the idea to examine literature this way is innovate and exciting. I loved the inspiration behind the book—the famous F. All hail the Great Automatic Grammatizator A marvelous book, from the most unpromising of premises - an entire volume dedicated to statistics in literature. If you've read the Roald Dahl book that titles this review, you might already have a vague glimmering of what to expect; a book that reduces writing down to simple science and mathematics. But fear not. It's a lot mo. Highly recommended for young and/or technical writers David Roher The first key to the success of this book is its modesty: unlike some other Digital Humanities work, it never tries to make grand literary conclusions or to "objectively" rank books. For all of the subjectivity and specificity of literature, there's plenty of prescriptivism and plenty of patterns. Blatt focuses on both of these.

All of his investigations and experiments are original, conducted himself, and no math knowledge is needed to understand the results. This eye-opening book will provide you with a new appreciation for your favorite authors and a fresh perspective on your own writing, illuminating both the patterns that hold great prose together and the brilliant flourishes that make it unforgettable.. In Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve, statistician and journalist Ben Blatt brings big data to the literary canon, exploring the wealth of fun findings that remain hidden in the works of the world's greatest writers. He assemb

---Kirkus . Illuminating entertainment Literary criticism by the numbers