Books by Mark Dunn
Ibid: A Novel
by Mark Dunn
Only Mark Dunn, author of the acclaimed Ella Minnow Pea, would attempt to write a novel entirely in footnotes-and succeed so triumphantly. Ibid is the off-the-wall fictional biography of Jonathan Blashette, a three-legged circus performer and deodorant entrepreneur. Dunn, a character in his own novel, is Blashette's esteemed biographer. But when Dunn's editor destroys the manuscript in an unfortunate bathtub accident, all that remains are the footnotes, which they arrange to publish in a consummate portrait of Blashette's strangely hilarious life story, one that offers some infinitely interesting morsels of American cultural history. Of course, as endnotes go, these are the tidbits, the marginalia: snippets of commentary, correspondence, court transcripts, song lyrics, and even a recipe for Boston baked beans. But in the topsy-turvy world of Ibid, the footnotes tell the truest story of all.
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ZOUNDS!: A Browser's Dictionary of Interjections
From Geronimo! to gesundheit to haminahamina to holy mackerel, and from abracadabra to zoinks, Mark Dunn and Sergio Aragonés show you interjections like you've never seen them before.
Often thought of as unnecessary verbal fringe or simply linguistic decoration, interjections (ahem, howdy, mamma mia, pshaw, tally-ho, whoop-de-do) may well be the most overlooked part of speech in the English language. ZOUNDS! A Browser's Dictionary of Interjections focuses the spotlight on this most deserving (and sometimes most demented) grammatical group. A light-hearted look at more than 500 interjections, ZOUNDS! explores the origins of these essential words and highlights the contributions of these previously unheralded parts of speech.
Perfect for both word lovers and the casual reader, ZOUNDS! brings together the linguistic talents of Mark Dunn, author of the award-winning novel Ella Minnow Pea, and the graphic hilarity of Sergio Aragonés, the legendary cartoonist and contributor to Mad Magazine, for a delightful romp through grammar, culture, and the English language.
Famous interjections include:
"Eureka!"
-Archimedes
"Badabing-badaboom"
-Tony Soprano
"Stuff and nonsense!"
-Alice, Alice in Wonderland
"Bah! Humbug!"
-Scrooge
"Fiddle-dee-dee !"
-Scarlett O'Hara
"Leapin' lizards!"
-Little Orphan Annie
"Nanoo, nanoo"
-Mork, from "Mork & Mindy"
"Dyn-O-Mite!"
-Jimmie Walker, "Good Times"
"Bully!"
-President Theodore Roosevelt
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Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters
by Mark Dunn
A hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere
Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is "a love letter to alphabetarians and logomaniacs everywhere" (Myla Goldberg, bestselling author of Bee Season).
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Ibid: A Life
by Mark Dunn
Tells the story of Jonathan Blashette, a three-legged circus performer and the CEO of Dandy-de-odor-o Inc., in a novel composed entirely of footnotes.
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The Age Altertron (Calamitous Adventures of Rodney and Wayne, Cosmic Repairboys)
by Mark Dunn
Thirteen-year-old twins Rodney and Wayne McCall and their friend Professor Johnson are the only people in Pitcherville who can see that all the natural laws of the universe have stopped applying to their town. When everyone in Pitcherville wakes up twelve years in the past, baby Rodney and baby Wayne must locate the Professor and find a way to get back to the present.
The first in an exciting new series from the beloved author of Ella Minnow Pea.
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Under the Harrow
by Mark Dunn
What if Charles Dickens had written a contemporary thriller? In Under the Harrow, a group of Victorians live a semi-idyllic and unwitting, anachronistic existence, aided only by minimal trade-related contact with the supposedly plague-ridden Outland. They are products of an experiment that had become a lucrative, voyeuristic peep-box for millionaires and their billionaire descendants. But the experiment has run its course, and Dingley Dell must be totally expungedand with it, all trace of the thousands of men, women, and children who live there. A few Dinglians learn the secret of both their manipulated past and their doomed future, and it is this motley group of Dickensian innocents who must race the clock to save their fellow countrymen and themselves from mass annihilation. Under the Harrow showcases the kind of dazzling wordplay and narrative richness that have made Mark Dunn's novels and plays both commercially successful and critically acclaimed.
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We Five: A Novel
by Mark Dunn
We Five tells the story of five young female friends and co-workers through the voices of five different authors, the story unfolding against five distinct historic backdrops. The driving conceit is that an anonymously authored manuscript from the mid-1860s (perhaps the work of Dickens contemporary Elizabeth Gaskell) was discovered and later published. Over the succeeding decades four other authors choose to retell this story in their own time and in their own way. The last author has now gone a step further: she has assembled all five versions into a literary pastiche which cycles chapter-by-chapter through the different versions as the central narrative progresses.
The result is a novel about five young women pursued by five young men of predatory purpose, which takes place alternatively in a small mill town outside of Manchester, England in 1859; in San Francisco on the eve of the 1906 earthquake and fire; in Sinclair Lewis’s fictional Zenith, Winnemac in 1923; in London during the Blitz of autumn, 1940; and in a small town in northern Mississippi in 1997. In the first book We Five” are seamstresses; in the next they are department store sales clerks; in the next, they sing in the choir of a popular female evangelist; in the next, they work in an ordinance factory outside of London; and in the final version, they are cocktail waitresses in a Mississippi River casino.
The book’s climax is a dramatic collision of all five incarnations of the story: an incident of mass hysteria arising from a solar storm in 1859, the 1906 San Francisco quake, a fire in the evangelist’s newly built temple” in 1923, the 1940 Balham Underground station bombing and flooding, and a tornado in rural 1997 Mississippi.
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American Decameron
by Mark Dunn
From the award-winning and highly acclaimed author of Ella Minnow Pea comes Mark Dunn's most ambitious novel to date. American Decameron tells one hundred stories, each taking place in a different year of the 20th century.
A girl in Galveston is born on the eve of a great storm and the dawn of the 20th century. Survivors of the Lusitania are accidentally reunited in the North Atlantic. A member of the Bonus Army find himself face to face with General MacArthur. A failed writer attempts to end his life on the Golden Gate Bridge until an unexpected heroine comes to his rescue, and on the doorstep of a new millennium, as the clock strikes twelve, the stage is set for a stunning denouement as the American century converges upon itself in a Greenwich nursing home, tying together all of the previous tales and the last one hundred years.
Zany and affecting, deeply moving and wildly hilarious, American Decameron is one America's most powerful voices at the top its game.
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Ella Minnow Pea: 20th Anniversary Illustrated Edition
by Mark Dunn
In this special anniversary edition, Mark Dunn is joined by talented illustrator Brittany Worsham in an illuminating, beloved story relating to language and freedom and human dignity in an era of political oppression.
First published by MacAdam/Cage in 2001, Mark Dunn’s novel Ella Minnow Pea celebrates its twentieth anniversary under the roof of Penguin/Random House and the British publisher Methuen. Over the years it has become a mainstay of book clubs and middle-school and high-school English classes, has inspired a stage musical LMNOP, and is the recipient of multiple accolades, including winning the 2001 Borders Original Voices competition for fiction.
Set on a fictional island off the coast of South Carolina, Ella Minnow Pea takes readers to the homeland of the late Nevin Nollop, the inventor of the pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Lionized for this achievement, he’s been honored with a monument featuring this famous phrase. But life for Nollopians drastically changes when the tile containing the letter “z” topples from the statue and island authorities interpret the fall as a message from Nollop from beyond the grave. They waste no time in banning this letter from all use. As other tiles fall, additional laws are passed which put increasing communicational constraints on the islanders, and ultimately undermine all the freedoms they had heretofore taken for granted. It is up to a young woman named Ella to restore order and sanity to the nation of Nollop, using the very tools used by Mr. Nollop to win the day.
Readers, both longtime fans of the book and those newly discovering its power and literary merit, will cherish this special keepsake edition.
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$29.95