Word: authored
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These three types of Singer stories share a sharp urgency, a sense that time is too precious to waste on flowery descriptions or circumlocutions. One character commands another, "Speak simple Yiddish," the language in which all these tales were originally written, and the English translations by the author and others do their best to obey the spirit of this injunction. Storytellers appear suddenly, with scant preamble, and seem eager to get off the page as soon as possible. They punctuate their narratives with such remarks as "To make it short . . ." and "Why drag it out?" The Trap involves yet another...
...author aims most effectively for the mind's ear; his fiction is filled with exuberant noise, the din of voices demanding attention, explaining themselves, complaining about the way the world has treated them. "Man has no more freedom than a bedbug," insists one. "In this respect, Spinoza was right." Another tells how jealousy drove him crazy: "I now hated all women. Lifting my hands to heaven, I swore never to marry." The narrator asks, "Did you keep your word?" The laconic response: "I have six grandchildren." Singer's people seldom shy away from expounding on the mysteries of existence: "People...
...GWTW Author Margaret Mitchell, who died in 1949, always refused to extend her story. But Mitchell's heirs were concerned because the book's copyright was due to expire in 2011, leaving the story unprotected. Thus they reluctantly agreed to let Ripley, whose own "big, fat, serious historicals" (Charleston, New Orleans Legacy) have fared well on the moonlight-and- magnolia circuit, write a sequel. Last week, with two chapters of the new GWTW written, major publishers kicked off a brisk bidding war. The hardcover rights could fetch as much as $6 million...
...sailboat Sweet Isolation. After Stateside service in the Army during World War II, Buckley went to Yale, where he used the rostrum and the columns of the university paper to crusade against liberalism. He formalized his quarrels in God and Man at Yale and became an unexpected best-selling author...
...CREATION by J.G. Ballard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $17.95). The quest for a hidden river in the Sahara unleashes a mythic adventure. Splendid surrealism from the author of Empire...