Word: bowens
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...union had originally asked for annual cost of living pay increases, Charles A. Bowen Jr., president of the MSP-FSU's coordinating committee, said yesterday, adding, "I wouldn't call this contract beautiful, when it has a raise under the inflation rate...
...Bowen's Anglo-Irish background, her childhood on a rural estate in County Cork, served her well when she went to London to write in the 1920s. Although sophistication came easily to her, along with Bloomsbury friends, she did not forget that cultivated society was a veneer over a more fundamental life, governed by forces of nature and timed to the rhythm of the seasons. This double vision gives a peculiar intensity to many of her stories; beneath their bright, sometimes ephemeral surfaces, implacable forces can be felt moving, well beyond human control. Sometimes they break...
...Many of Bowen's stories were influenced by the work of Henry James and Virginia Woolf. What saves them from the pallid artiness of imitation is the author's taste for melodrama. She knows how to slip in the bizarre or improbable for the purpose of raising expectations, not eyebrows. Ghosts walk in some of these tales, and they are not explained away as wandering, ectoplasmic neuroses. They are what they are. Bowen's fiction is sometimes as strange as truth. In The Evil That Men Do-, a bored housewife writes a love letter...
Perhaps the best group of stories in this collection deals with England during World War II, especially London in the blitz. Bowen courageously, stubbornly stayed in her house there, when many friends had taken to the countryside to escape the German bombardment. While the city shook and plaster fell, Bowen collected images and wove them into stories that hauntingly balanced civilization above an abyss. In the Square notes how the bombs were returning London to nature: "The sun, now too low to enter [the square] normally, was able to enter brilliantly at a point where three of the houses...
...wrong, as the story he appears in proves. Bowen consistently found language for feelings that might otherwise have simply seemed preposterous. She worked artfully to make her work appear unlabored. An apt, if unintended, description of her achievement appears in Ivy Gripped the Steps, one of her finest stories. A young boy visits a seaside resort and marvels at the glittering life he sees...