April 25, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Anagramming the News By Dylan Hicks Child’s play. Ed. Note: every month, the Daily features a puzzle by Dylan Hicks. The first list of correct answers wins a year’s subscription to The Paris Review. (In the event that no one can get every answer, the list with the most correct responses will win.) Send an e-mail with your answers to [email protected]. The deadline is Thursday, April 28, at noon EST, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck! Our latest puzzle anagrammatizes names and titles ripped or daintily cut from newspapers and magazines published this April. The anagrams have been arranged into three numerically uneven groups. In the first group, Multiplex Marquee Prank, you’ll find the jumbled titles of movies in wide release as of this mid-April writing. With a few exceptions, the anagrams don’t relate to or otherwise provide clues to the movies, but since there are relatively few titles playing widely on big screens at any given time, the pool of possible answers should be manageable. Because some of the anagrams might on first glance resemble nonsense, each is preceded by a context-suggesting parenthetical. So, a puzzle leading to Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead might look like this: Read More
March 22, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Paris Match: The Answers By Dylan Hicks Ed. Note: yesterday’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner this time is Shalina Sandran, who gets a free subscription to the Review. Congratulations, Shalina! Below, the solution to Dylan’s puzzle. Read More
March 21, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Paris Match By Dylan Hicks A cut-and-paste puzzle. Ed. Note: our puzzle correspondent, Dylan Hicks, is back at it again. As usual, the first correct answer will win a year’s subscription to The Paris Review. Send an e-mail with your answers to [email protected]. The deadline is Thursday, March 24, at noon EST, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck! This latest puzzle takes the form of a collage story, “Castling,” composed of thirty-three numbered sentences lifted from disparate sources: novels, poems, histories, liner notes, yellowed magazine articles, packaging, what have you. The story’s structure and pacing wouldn’t escape pointed critique in the more cutthroat writing workshops. Please make contextual allowances. Below the story are its thirty-three jumbled-but-lettered (and in seven cases, double-lettered) sources. Your task is to match each sentence with its correct source. So, if the sources weren’t jumbled, your answer form would look like this: Read More
February 23, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Thirty Word Puzzles: The Answers By Dylan Hicks Bernhard Sprute, Painting Bienenbild, 2010. Ed. note: Last week, we featured Dylan’s latest puzzle: thirty punning, word-bending, assonant, homophonic, homonymic riddles. The contest has ended—thanks to all who entered! Turns out no one was able to get all thirty answers, so we’ve chosen one winner: Cindy Dapogny, who had the most correct responses. Congratulations to Cindy! Read More
February 19, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Puzzle Deadline Extended on Grounds of Extreme Difficulty! By Dylan Hicks Bernhard Sprute, Painting Bienenbild, 2010. Ed. Note: Perhaps you’ve noticed that we did not, in fact, announce winners yesterday. Noon came and went, and no announcement! It has been brought to our attention that the conditions, as they stand, are too harsh: the puzzles are really, really hard! So we’re modifying the rules—namely, just do as many as you can. Twenty? Great! Ten? Send ’em along. You have until Monday. Good luck! Read More
February 16, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Solve These Thirty Word Puzzles! By Dylan Hicks Bernhard Sprute, Painting Bienenbild, 2010. Ed. Note: The response to our last round of word puzzles was so overwhelming that puzzle correspondent Dylan Hicks has brought you thirty more! This time, we’re demanding total accuracy: the first three correct lists will win a year’s subscription to The Paris Review. You must solve all thirty riddles correctly. Send an e-mail with your answers to [email protected]. The deadline is Thursday, February 18, at noon EST, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck! As a boy, I wasn’t alone in believing there to be a wonderful blue-eyed soul duo out of Philadelphia called Haulin’ Oats. Their music, we hoped, would provide solace during our imminent and futile battles against killer bees. Some of us grew up to be small-batch granolatiers and had to fend of lawsuits from Daryl and John themselves. The answers to the following thirty puzzles are in a similar spirit—of word-bending, that is, not litigation. They employ antanaclasis, homophony, homonymy, rhyme, assonance, and other devices toward paronomasia—okay, they’re puns. The form, I realize, has a mixed reputation. Maybe a few further words of explanation are required. The answers tweak, reframe, or link a variety of sources: titles of books, movies, and other artworks; proper names; famous lines of poetry or political rhetoric; clichés and other well-traveled terms. Many are paragrams—plays built on the alteration of a letter or letters, not always in service to rhyme. To foster challenge and competition, a few of the clues are oblique, but never deliberately obfuscatory, though anachronism and other breaches of logic have been tolerated or encouraged. Mostly the clues try to cover the bases without too much bold-face. For instance, “Ursine Frisco bandleader trucks off to buy bings and maraschinos” might cue “Cherry Garcia.” That one was judged to be off-limits, but the standard for innovation wasn’t set fussily high. Though none of the answers were wittingly plagiarized, a half hour on the leading search engine revealed, to little surprise, that I wasn’t the first or, in some cases, the fourth to arrive at several of these (ingenious) puns. My apologies, then, for that, and for everything. Federal Reserve stocks up massively on Stouffer’s. Boundless w/r/t Yeezy. And as in uffish thought he stood, At peroration of his rapWith mimsy smile he cocked his head And cued the crowd, “Please clap.” Sellout Marxist pitches for OxiClean. MacDougal Street corner spot where Peter Pastmaster, Paul Pennyfeather, and Lady Mary Lygon might have blown in the wind. Khakis coax truth. The Sun now rose upon the right,And parched the sloping mast The Mariner raised his skinny hand, And spake the long forecast Melvillian scrivener conditionally favors Russian pop duo. Thatcher refuses butter-making shift. Shazam, Sergeant Carter, here you are managin’ a Bally Fitness while I’m right next door teachin’ Zumba at Snap. I reckon we’re: After Cunningham, Wright, Carter, Leaf, Stoerner, Hutchinson, Testaverde, Henson, and Bledsoe, Cowboys fan complains with a Yeatsian sigh: Babylonian beau, to minimize riskMight have shunned holey walls for red flying disks Photo-album caption cleverly annotates sunken-eyed, death-defying actor’s trip to Yakushi-ji. Tennyson follows up pathbreaking collection with odes to mostly round, fleshy fruits. Steven Ellison remixes stage name while piloting Air Force One. The Belle of Amherst runs over Rogen. Spanglish bed sized for married grammarians—or serial monogamists. Coates and Steinman coauthor book by dashboard light. Starring opposite Cary Grant, Mae West misquotes “The Canonization” in this little-known Metaphysical romp. Bloodily horrific day at voluminous East Village bookstore. Kafka executor visits Wexler and Abrams. Habitat 67 mastermind takes the wheel of ice-cream truck. Wallace Stevens guides multifocal examination of Clinton e-mails. Edmund Wilson holes up in fortified residence with Symbolist library and truckload of GlaxoSmithKline SSRI. I met him at the concert hallHe plumbed the depths of Schubert songs—you get the picture?(Ja, sehen wir) That’s when I fell for: Sled provides key to ambitious biopic of Family Circus Early in ’61, a very young Declan MacManus sets his sights on Dominican dictator. Under Professor Boyd’s tutelage, Bonzo begins to act according to unconditional moral laws. Patricidal space meanie joins forces with Australian-born pop goddess. Weary of the spotlight, supporting-actor nominee quietly launches spicy-chicken stand. Read More