Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; with Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory » (Abridged)

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty books, covering subjects from the Pittsburgh Steelers to Robert E. Lee, to trying to understand the South. He is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! and is a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly.

Born in Indianapolis and raised in Decatur, Georgia, Blount now lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, the painter Joan Griswold.

Alphabet Juice derives an organic take on language that is unlike, and more fun than, any other.

The New York Times - Jack Shafer

This alphabetically arranged book reads like a big bag of salty snacks: nibble five or six of its 500-plus entries and you'll have to wolf the whole thing…A self-diagnosed hyperlexic since first grade, Blount hangs out in dictionaries the way other writers hang out in bars. It's easy to picture him making a pub crawl of the Oxford English Dictionary, Webster's Third New International Dictionary (unabridged), the Random House unabridged dictionary and especially the American Heritage Dictionary, where he helps tend bar as a member of its official usage panel. Both giddy and sober, as if ripped on Old Crow fortified with Adderall, Blount chases letters, words and phrases to their origins, and when stumped he hypothesizes.