Word: authored
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...publication of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Collected Stories prompted critical applause, commercial success and a nagging uneasiness among the author's devoted readers. Might this summing-up of a life's work, coming from a man whose career had already been decorated with a Nobel Prize, be an indication that Singer, then 74, was thinking of slowing down? In retrospect, ! of course, it would have made more sense and wasted less time to be concerned that birds would stop singing or the world suddenly grow sensible and dull. Forces of nature do not stop voluntarily. Sure enough, a book...
...short fiction, from long-established classics like Gimpel the Fool to the latest story, hot off the presses, is amazingly of a piece. Three basic formulas are constantly repeated. Unrest stirs a rural Polish village, thanks to the mischief of its inhabitants and their attendant demons. An aspiring young author passes his time in Warsaw visiting the Yiddish Writers' Club and storing up everything he hears and does. An older incarnation of the same man, expatriated from Poland and living on Manhattan's Upper West Side, submits willingly to readers and strangers who come to his door bearing strange tales...
Simon, of course, is an acclaimed playwright, but after watching Fools, it is difficult to imagine why. The play's faults are as profound as they come: the author has made little effort to say anything relevant, let alone meaningful, to any audience other than perhaps children. As a result, the humor--and Simon does have a undeniable knack for one-liners--is entirely superficial and makes you feel sheepish for actually laughing...
...That author states, as well, that Harvard's "anti-union" strategy has been condemned by 21 student groups, Joseph Kennedy II, Barney Frank, and various other groups whose lives I see to be totally unaffected by the unionization of my work environment. Why did anyone ask them...
...further annoyed by the author's persistent placement of quotation marks around the work "information," as if, despite the motto of his or her school, he or she has no concept of what the term means. The author has a right to his or her opinion; indeed, I am still forming mine. But Harvard employees are not worker drones in need of salvation, and we welcome the opportunity to investigate both sides of this complicated issue. Sharon E. Block Marketing Staff Assistant Harvard School of Public Health