“Amusing and informative”
— Pultizer-winner Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
“such a fun read”
— Dinesh Ramde, Washington Times
My book about the fun of crosswords, The Crossword Century: 100 Years of Witty Wordplay, Ingenious Puzzles, and Linguistic Mischief, has been published by Gotham.
A couple of responses…
“Alan Connor’s Crossword Century is a fun and fascinating tale of language, commerce, culture and play. Before reading this book, I didn’t have a clue about the crossword’s checkered past. Now I can see its extraordinary future, too.”
— John Pollack, author of The Pun Also Rises and Shortcut: How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation and Sell Your Greatest Ideas
“If you love language and history and marvel at the genius of puzzles, codes, and game design, Alan Connor’s deep dive into the crossword will keep you smiling and eagerly turning pages. Connor playfully explores the history of the beloved, gamified fever dream of sentences, definitions, letters, and words that is the modern crossword and reveals the dance that strange invention has enjoyed with its caretakers across history. If you adore words and wordplay, if you see language as an endless mutating jungle of puzzles and experimentation, you need this book in your life.”
— David McRaney, author of You Are Not so Smart and You Are Now Less Dumb
…some press…
- This Week’s Must-Read Books, New York Post
- The Crossword’s Meandering 100-Year Journey, MacLean’s
- Down, But Not Out: The Uncertain Future of the Crossword Puzzle, The Atlantic
…and the reviews of the British edition as a word cloud:
It is available at your local bookshop, or at IndieBound, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, Books-A-Million, The Book Depository, iTunes, and so on.
And… it contains a puzzle by Brendan Emmett Quigley.
Listen: Think, from KERA
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- Buy or read more about the UK edition
- Up to Date, KCUR · The Book Report · Lincoln Live, KFOR · Craig Fahle Show, WDET · Life Elsewhere, WMNF · Martin Kilcoyne Show, KTRS · Dean & Don, KMA-FM · Central Time, Wisconsin Public Radio
- Word cloud from Wordle
- Health & Self-Improvement Staff Picks, Penguin USA Blog
Tags: books, crosswords, language, wordplay, writing
