Word: authored
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lonely struggle to produce a big book that has impressed some pretty influential folks. Yale professor Harold Bloom calls Brodkey "unparalleled in American prose fiction since the death of William Faulkner." Susan Sontag says Brodkey is "going for real stakes. I read every word he writes." The author, who lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side, has sometimes been willing to join the chorus of his admirers: "It's dangerous to be as good a writer...
...with evidence? Nevertheless, here comes Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, which collects 18 pieces that have appeared over the past 25 years, many of them in The New Yorker. The book's arrival has been accompanied by a fire storm of respectful publicity, illustrated with photographs of the author looking pensive or, in some instances, mildly worried, as if he had let himself in for some discouraging words...
Originally commissioned by Simon & Schuster, the manuscript of Fit to Print was rejected there and at a number of other top publishing houses. Goulden, author of 15 other books, including the 1972 best seller The Superlawyers, ultimately turned to Lyle Stuart, an imprint with a reputation for taking chances. Stuart claims that Simon & Schuster backed away because the book is too hard hitting and would offend the proprietors of the country's most influential book review. Not true, says Simon & Schuster; Goulden's work simply fell below its standards...
...subject's personal life, including his prolonged extramarital affair with actress Katharine Balfour, whom, says Goulden, he promised to marry but eventually abandoned. Still, Fit to Print is at times as sympathetic as it is damning. Goulden clearly shares many of Rosenthal's conservative political views, and the author provides a sensitive account of the editor's painful childhood, during which Rosenthal lost his father and three sisters to accident and illness and came perilously close to being crippled himself. Above all, Rosenthal is portrayed as profoundly insecure, a man who when casually asked by a stranger whether...
...less political than Allende's last two novels, which decry the military dictatorship in the author's native land, Eva Luna protests abuses of power and corruption in a South American nation which one takes to be Venezuela. But her political commentary takes a different, more subtle tack here...