Word: deadness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nightmare of trying to describe music with prose. But more than that, this is a novel about people who have wasted massive chunks of their lives--Duncan in sterile rock-critic hermeneutics (he's like the worst-case-scenario future of Rob Fleming from High Fidelity); Annie in a dead romance and a dead-end job; and Crowe in sulky, creatively arid seclusion. They're trying to make the best of what's left, but what's left just isn't that great. Juliet, Naked is a bleaker book than Hornby's A Long Way Down, and that was about...
...from A Gate at the Stairs reveals a density of wry, pitilessly accurate observation unlike anything else in contemporary fiction: "The Mexican strawberries in the refrigerator had grown the wise and cheery beards of Santa Claus." Looking out through an icicle-hung window is like "living in the cold, dead mouth of a very mean snowman." Anybody else wanting to be the greatest writer of Moore's generation is now throwing his or her hat on the ground and stomping...
Novelists love twins--evil twins, vanishing twins, incestuous twins, conjoined twins, spooky dead-little-girl twins. We make handy symbols for any writer who feels inclined to muse on the nature of human identity, which is basically every writer ever. But twins aren't symbols; they're people. There are not, to my knowledge, any great identical-twin novelists (though I think John Barth has a twin sister), and I have never yet read a fictional account of twinness that I found convincing, with one exception: Darin Strauss's excellent Chang and Eng, about Barnum & Bailey's famous Siamese twins...
Kristol described his philosophy as one of "conservative pessimism." During the Clinton presidency, my wife once expressed to him her dismay at baby boomers' self-indulgence. "I wouldn't worry too much," Irving advised. "Soon they'll be dead." A witty, unflinching observer of politics and society, he advised Presidents and undergraduates with equal patience and generosity...
...enhanced photos are often used in mass-marketing campaigns for everything from soft drinks to luxury cars to travel packages, Boyer says the images are gradually leading to a standardization of what is considered beautiful - and by extension, what isn't. (Read "In the Paris Métro, Even Dead Legends Can't Smoke...