What a confetti that summer was, spent snipping invented words in Shakespeare.  Occam's razor was at hand for painstakingly isolating those simplest inventions, the elegantly minimalist one-letter words.  Hawthorne may have his scarlet letter, but Shakespeare's coinages are pure gold.  The poet Geof Huth suggests that tiny expressions both surprise and justify, making ourselves vessels of concentration, inviting us to accept the mantle of makers of meaning.  Thus attending to precision, "we become whom we are asked to become" (Geof Huth, "in tininess, we," June 22, 2009).

The Shakespeare Papers dedicated an entire issue to one-letter words, and here's one of the pages we contributed.  See our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.

"My pen, animated in part by itself and animated in part by all the rest, flies into the lambent paper sky.  My pen is a wing and every word, borne by it and by its shadow on the paper, rushes towards either catastrophe or apotheosis."
—Robert Desnos, Liberty or Love!

Franzlations (New Star Books, $19 pa., Oct.), the new collaboration from Gary Barwin, Hugh Thomas, and Craig Conley, has nothing to do with Jonathan Franzen. Instead, it’s a reinterpretation and reinvention of the parables and aphorisms of Franz Kafka.

I am always disappointed with mountains.  There are no mountains in the world as high as I would wish.  They irritate me invariably.  I should like to shake Switzerland. —Ronald Firbank, The Princess Zoubaroff

[in a voice which is rather like cheap scent]

[playing extinct eyes]

[All but imperceptibly, twilight begins to form.]

[impressionistically]

[blinking at a flash of summer lightning]

[covering her eyes with an elaborately becoroneted Vanity-bag]

A long sunbeam lighting up the whatnot . . .

Make ready the thingamies!

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"The livid emaciation of reptiles."
—Jean Ray, Malpertuis