An UPDATE on Sept. 9: I heard back from Rahul Mehta yesterday regarding the second item below. He gave me permission to reproduce his email here on my website:
Dear Bill,
Thank you so much for these very kind words about my novel NO OTHER WORLD. It means so much to me to know that you were moved by it. I'm also grateful to you for pointing out the error on page 207. The book is getting ready for reprint as a paperback, so perhaps it is not too late to make this correction.
Thanks again for getting in touch. All best wishes to you.
Sincerely,
Rahul
***
This sentence appears in the September issue of Bon Appétit, in an article titled "Tools of the Trade," which tells you the very low-tech things (including slotted spoons, ice, and a food mill) you need in your kitchen to enable you to cook like "a restaurant pro":
That doesn't mean that in order to make decent food at home you need a fully outfitted showroom (like what I imagine Daniel Boulud or Martha Stewart have at their houses) or a state-of-the-art professional setup (like the basement of the big fancy restaurant in Manhattan where I toiled away subterraneanly until not so long ago).
I kept going back and forth as to whether a comma or two was needed to set off "in order to make decent food at home." My final judgment is that the sentence would read better if it were recast to start with "That doesn't mean you need" and end with "to make decent food at home," with the "in order" discarded.
I would have said "like what I imagine Daniel Boulud and Martha Stewart have at their houses" because 1) both of them no doubt have sweet kitchens and 2) the or needed a singular possessive pronominal adjective, not the plural one we were given. I realize the writer/editors may have been purposefully going for a singular, gender-neutral use of their here, but it's so much easier and, I would argue, more accurate to use and ... their than or ... their.
Subterraneanly looked odd to me at first, but both Merriam-Webster's and Webster's New World give it preference over subterraneously.
***
No Other World, by first-time novelist Rahul Mehta, is the most emotionally compelling novel I've ever experienced. The characters, especially main protagonist Kiran Shah, whom we see age from a socially awkward child to an ill-adjusted, young gay man, were amazingly vividly drawn.
Enjoying the book tremendously didn't stop this *ahem* sharp-eyed editor from noticing what I believe is a mistaken character name. I just sent the following email to Mehta through his website:
I want to first tell you how very much I enjoyed No Other World. It packed more of an emotional punch than any other work of fiction I've read. Because I'm an anal-retentive copy editor, I also feel a need to point out what I think is a mistake on p. 207. "Shanti's mother found occasional work—when they needed her—carrying rocks from one part of the site to another, and Prakash found work fetching tea during breaks." Shouldn't that be "Prakash's mother"?
Shanti is Kiran's mother and had no direct connection to Prakash/Pooja, a transgender girl whom Kiran befriends while visiting relatives in India.
I'll update this post if/when I hear back.
***
Here's a corner of the cover of the September issue of Martha Stewart Living:
I think some lines, or rules, are wanted between the three headlines at the top so they don't read like one continuous bit of text, given that the three blurbs are all in the same-size type and the same font, with no color variation.
I'm also not loving the em dash in the teaser copy, but I realize I would be in the minority among editorial professionals in that opinion. Ever since I wrote my first post here at BillHawley.net, because I've been on the lookout for them, I've been seeing what I consider to be em-dash faults every-freaking-where.
I also, at first, thought it would be better to have four periods after COVERED, but since periods aren't used at the end of any blurb on the page, it wouldn't make sense to use one to end the sentence there and lead into the ellipsis, even though it clearly is a complete sentence.
***
While I'm critiquing magazine covers, here's the latest one for Game Informer:
The space between the first E and the I ought to be bigger than the space between any other two letters.