Word: bookings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Keeffe, who owned a copy of Kandinsky's book, was no Theosophist, but like him, she felt that abstract art could express the artist's purely internal realities. In 1915 she was a 28-year-old art teacher stuck at a small women's college in South Carolina. One year earlier, she had been living happily in New York City and getting her first eager taste of Picasso, Braque and American modernists like John Marin. Stranded in a place she called the "tail end of the world," she decided to go where none of those artists had ventured. Drawing...
Byatt's latest novel, The Children's Book (Knopf; 675 pages), her ninth work of fiction since Possession, earned a spot on the Man Booker short list and has been hailed as a return to peak form. It's not quite that good - it has Possession's omnivorous range but not its propulsive discipline. Still, The Children's Book is a rich and ambitious work, steeped in ideas and capped with a lacerating final...
...aspiring potter, is sketching the metalwork and camping out secretly amid the statuary. On the lam from a bleak working-class future in England's industrial north, Philip has the good fortune to be discovered by two sympathetic boys, one of whom is the son of children's-book author Olive Wellwood. Soon our ceramist is apprenticed to Wellwood family friend Benedict Fludd, a master potter...
...there is a payoff for sticking with all of them. With the book's end in sight, Byatt snatches the Wellwoods and their circle, who have been living in a kind of Midsummer Night's Dream - admittedly a delusional version, shot through with subplots involving abuse and incest - out of their fairy costumes and deposits them in the vermin-infested trenches and blood-soaked hospitals of World War I. In conveying the vicious indifference with which their lives are shattered, Byatt's penetrating, unsentimental style hits its mark. None of Olive's fairy tales could have foretold...
...times the period details elbow out Byatt's story (parts of the novel read like notes for a cultural history), those details are never less than fascinating. Some English soldiers, we learn, named trenches for beloved works of literature - children's books, no less. But by the end of The Children's Book, it's hard to imagine the young men who christened Peter Pan Trench as harboring any illusions about not growing up or sharing Peter's view that "to die will be an awfully big adventure...