Word: brac
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...distinct stages lasting a minute and five seconds, the quaking stunned the populace out of sleep into an incomprehensible terror of showering plaster, scattering bric-a-brac, breaking dishes, shifting furniture, toppling walls and collapsing roofs. Waterfront houses lurched and fell apart, hotels hopped off their foundations. In the working-class district south of Market Street, tenements turned into tangled splinters, and four hotels capsized and collapsed, trapping scores. An added blast rattled the area, as the city gas plant blew up. Thousands of chimneys plunged through roofs. Many residents drowned, trapped, in deluges from ruptured water mains. An elaborate...
Chabon is one in a long line of young novelists to examine the strange bric-a-brac of our day. Unlike Jay McInerney--whose debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was a dirge devoid of rebirth, and set in the heart of the New World jungle, New York City--Chabon retains a Midwestern sensibility and even-mindedness. Chabon's prose can be as funny as McInerney's, but its message is more cheerful...
...seven of the tales in Fast Lanes, however, sort through the bric-a-brac of unmade lives: "It was September of 1974, most of us would leave town in a few weeks, and I had been recently pregnant. Some of us were going to Belize to survive an earthquake. Some of us were going to California . . . My lover, the carpenter, was going to Nicaragua on a house-building deal that would never materialize. We'd had passport photos taken together; he would use his passport in the company of someone else and I would lose mine somewhere in Arizona...
...with a sexual life is dressed in some variation of off-white -- and looks cool, stylish and slightly soiled. Two ornate sofas are shrouded with crumpled, much used sheets: this is a world of ceaseless, unsatisfying copulation. Although the sides of the stage are heaped with the bric-a-brac of elegance -- candelabra, statuary, flowers -- the characters seem more at home with simple louvered screens, behind which they peep and eavesdrop. The dialogue is fittingly brittle and epigrammatic. "When it comes to marriage," a much traveled woman says, "one man is as good as the next; and even the least...
...change course at just the moment they become mainstream doctrine. The effect (although not the intention, usually) is to make outsiders and stylistic slow learners scramble to catch up. Thus today, as the giant architectural firms have begun routinely gussying up their new high-rise towers in pseudoantique brica-brac -- fake Corinthian columns, pediments and pyramidal tops -- the cutting edge has glided past. As postmodern cliches become ubiquitous, in other words, the movement is becoming passe...