Word: authorization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories is not major Bellow. In one respect it is a package designed to keep the author's name before the public. Three of the six stories in the collection, Looking for Mr. Green, The Gonzaga Manuscripts and A Father-to-Be, first appeared between hard covers in the 1956 edition of Seize the Day. This fact Bellow's publisher has conspicuously avoided mentioning. But once the reader gets into the stories, annoyance gives way to grudging gratitude, for these are fine examples of the craft of short fiction...
...cousin who refused to see a rich brother unless he paid a $20,000 entrance fee to her hospital room. She believed that he had cheated her many years before. The preposterousness of the situation dissolves when brother and sister are reconciled in a scene that conveys forcefully the author's tragicomic sense of life. Even Dr. Braun, the scientist, is "bitterly moved" by the "crude circus of feeling"-but not so moved that it prevents him from trying to explain human emotions in molecular and cosmic metaphors...
Solzhenitsyn's relentless narrative, moreover, takes place early in Khrushchev's regime, when the Soviet Union was first beginning to admit, and partially mitigate, the crudest of Stalin's repressions. For metaphorically inclined readers, it is justifiable to observe that Oleg Kostoglotov, the author's rough-hewn hero, has his relief from cancer (as Solzhenitsyn himself did) in 1955, precisely when the U.S.S.R. was having its first remission of the disease of mass exile and imprisonment...
...Yorker cartoon, a horrified patient looks up from the operating table and asks the masked doctor, "How do I know you're not George Plimpton?" How, indeed? The author of Paper Lion and Out of My League has played as a bumbling quarterback for the Detroit Lions and performed as an inexpert pitcher in Yankee Stadium...
Many of these analogies are based on wishful thinking, the author says...