Stefan Fatsis in conversation with Jonathan Eig, "Unabridged"

Stefan Fatsis will be at The Book Cellar to discuss his new book Unabridged: The Thrill of (and threat to) the Modern Dictionary. Joining him in conversation is author Jonathan Eig. 

About the Book:

Words are the currency of culture—and never more than today. From selfie to doomscrolling to rizz, our hyper-connected digital world coins and spreads new words with lightning speed and locks them into mainstream consciousness with unprecedented influence. Journalist and bestselling author Stefan Fatsis embedded as a lexicographer-in-training at America’s most famous dictionary publisher, Merriam-Webster, to learn how words get into the dictionary, where they come from, who decides what they mean, and how we write and think about them. As he recounts in Unabridged, he discovered the history and fascinating subculture of the dictionary and of those who curate and revere “one of the most basic features of our collective humanity.”

Fatsis reveals the little-known story of how the brothers George and Charles Merriam acquired Noah Webster’s original American dictionary and reshaped the business of language forever. Merriam-Webster became America’s most successful and enduring compendium of words, withstanding intense competition and cultural controversies—only to be threatened by the power of Google and artificial intelligence today.

Delving into Merriam’s legendary archives and parsing its arcane rules, Fatsis learns the painstaking precision required for writing good definitions. He examines how the dictionary has handled the most explosive slurs and the revolutionary change in pronouns. He votes on the annual Word of the Year, travels to the legendary Oxford English Dictionary, and visits the world’s greatest private dictionary collection in a Greenwich Village apartment stuffed with more than 20,000 books. Fatsis demonstrates how words are weaponized in our polarized political culture—from liberal to woke to DEI—and, in a time of insurrections and pandemics, how they can be a literal matter of life and death. Along the way, he manages to write a few definitions that crack the code and are enshrined in the pixelated dictionary.

About the Author:

Stefan Fatsis is the author of the New York Times bestseller Word Freak, about the world of competitive Scrabble; A Few Seconds of Panic, about life in the National Football League; and Wild and Outside, about minor league baseball. His latest book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary will be published in October by Grove Atlantic. In four decades as a journalist, Fatsis has written and talked for Slate, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and many other outlets. He lives in Washington, D.C.

About the Convsersation Partner: 

Jonathan Eig won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for King: A Life, which The New York Times hailed as the definitive biography of Martin Luther King Jr. He’s the author of six books, four of them New York Times bestsellers. His works have been translated into more than 20 languages. Jonathan’s fourth book, The Birth of the Pill, will be staged as a theatrical production next year by TimeLine Theatre in Chicago. His biography of Muhammad Ali won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award and inspired a Ken Burns documentary. He’s currently at work on a biography of George Soros.

RSVP HERE