Word: artfully
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nearly 2,000 drawings there; to celebrate his 50th year at the magazine, he has selected more than 250 for publication in a new book. The world of Steig is populated mostly by grotesques, human and animal, gamboling through life. More often than not, critics treat his work as art. Steig is less sure. "I suppose every cartoonist likes to be called an artist," he says, "but if people ask me what I am, I say cartoonist...
...Roth was 40 at the time. His reputation as a master of literary comedy had been firmly established by Portnoy's Complaint. My Life as a Man (1974) and The Professor of Desire (1977) returned to the sensitive roots of his wit: the conflicts between lust and respectability, art and burlesque, cultural ties and personal freedom, the problem of how to be-or not to be-a Jew. Civilization and its discontents were no longer a set of Freudian trampolines for a spry intelligence; the escape from solemnity required a more studied effort. Oddly, Roth's most exciting...
What the tribe finds offensive, the literary priesthood hails as original. Zuckerman is granted an audience at the Berkshire retreat of E.I. Lonoff, a celebrated carpenter of ironic Jewish stories. To the young writer, art replaces traditions, Lonoff supersedes all spiritual advisers as the chief rabbi of aesthetic purity, and the visit itself becomes a kind of bar mitzvah at which Zuckerman is accepted as a man and a writer...
...real Amy curtly evades Nathan's questions about her background. She is a smart and very tough cookie. As is Lonoff; as is Zuckerman; as is Roth himself. The Ghost Writer is a bruising book. Within its artfully tangled plot, Roth tells off his critics and debunks romantic notions of the writing life. Henry James' "passion of doubt" and "madness of art" become a medieval incubus and fanatic patience; Lonoff, more the ascetic Old World Jew than his Yankee trappings might indicate, spends all his time pushing sentences around and worrying about them. His comment on writing...
...lake in Michigan, Buster early became an extremely proficient duck hunter." Such blemishes are too bad. Keaton never pretended that there was more to his work than met the eye, because he did not have to. Unfortunately, his biographer felt that pretensions were necessary, when the life and art alone would have been enough.-Paul Gray