British author Lynne Truss is a self-described "stickler," a nut about punctuation who can't rest easy when she sees mistakes on street signs, newspaper headlines or billboards. ("Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger," she says upon spotting a misplaced apostrophe.) As a punctuation perfectionist, Truss considers herself part of a rare breed, and she expected her book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, to interest only a tiny segment of the British population when it was first published in the U.K. last year. However, to the surprise of the author, her publisher and just about everyone else in Britain, the book became a number-one bestseller, even topping sales of John Grisham's latest legal thriller.

Will the book have the same appeal for American readers? We'll find out on April 12, when Gotham Books releases the North American edition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Editors at Gotham, who might have been afraid to wade into the copyediting waters with an opinionated author like Truss, wisely decided to reprint the book exactly as it was in the original version, with all its British spellings and punctuation intact. Some of the references might well be confusing to American readers—she refers to a period as a "full stop," for example—but Truss manages to get her point across nonetheless.

Proper punctuation, she argues, is similar to good manners, a system for making your intentions clear. Truss fusses about people who insist on adding apostrophes to plurals (DVD's), who use the wrong possessive for "it" (its'), and who put commas in many, many places where they don't belong. Her most hilarious example of the latter is replicated in the book's title, a reference to a wildlife manual with poor punctuation that unintentionally turned a panda into a gun-wielding restaurant diner (you'll have to read the book for the full joke).

Funny and self-deprecating but always serious about her mission, Truss is a stern commander in the war on careless writing. Weary editors, schoolteachers and fellow sticklers everywhere will wish her victory in this much-needed battle. Copyright 2004 BookPage Reviews.

Pynchon sets his new novel in and around Gordita Beach, a mythical surfside paradise named for all the things his PI hero, Larry "Doc" Sportello, loves best: nonnutritious foods, healthy babies, curvaceous femme fatales. We're in early-'70s Southern California, so Gordita Beach inevitably suggests a kind of Fat City, too, ripe for the plundering of rapacious real estate combines and ideal for Pynchon's recurring tragicomedy of America as the perfect wave that got away.

It all starts with Pynchon's least conspicuous intro ever: "She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to"—she being Doc's old flame Shasta, fearful for her lately conscience-afflicted tycoon boyfriend, Mickey. There follow plots, subplots and counterplots till you could plotz. Behind each damsel cowers another, even more distressed. Pulling Mr. Big's strings is always a villain even bigger. More fertile still is Pynchon's unmatched gift for finding new metaphors to embody old obsessions. Get ready for glancing excursions into maritime law, the nascent Internet, obscure surf music and Locard's exchange principle (on loan from criminology), plus a side trip to the lost continent of Lemuria. But there's a blissful, sportive magnanimity, too, a forgiveness vouchsafed to pimps, vets, cops, narcs and even developers that feels new, or newly heartfelt. Blessed with a sympathetic hero, suspenseful momentum and an endlessly suggestive setting, the novel's bones need only a touch of the screenwriter's dark chiropractic arts to render perhaps American literature's most movie-mad genius, of all things, filmable.

Inherent Vice deepens Pynchon's developing California cycle, following The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland with a shaggy-dog epic of Eden mansionized and Mansonized beyond recognition—yet never quite beyond hope. Across five decades now, he's more or less alternated these West Coast chamber pieces with his more formidable symphonies (V; Gravity's Rainbow; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day). Partisans of the latter may find this one a tad slight. Fans of the former will know it for the throwaway masterwork it is: playful as a dolphin, plaintive as whale song, unsoundably profound as the blue Pacific. (Aug.)