Word: fabulists
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...past, Singer fuses two styles: the fabulist confined to his shtetl and the modernist who regards the universe as a stark and enigmatic combat zone. If Joseph Shapiro is disagreeable, he is never less than credible; once again the author displays a talent for mimicry that has previously allowed him to imitate Satan, fools, saints and, on one occasion, a rooster. True, his gift has been squandered on a man with no redeeming features, but for once Singer is not out to charm his readers. He and his penitent seem content to prove the old Yiddish proverb "Going backward...
DIED. John Gardner, 49, prolific author of stylistically adventuresome fiction, enthusiastic teacher and, sometimes, messianic literary critic; of injuries sustained when he lost control of his motorcycle and crashed; near his home in Susquehanna, Pa., four days before he was to have married for the third time. A philosophical fabulist, Gardner wrote a dozen novels (among them, Grendel, 1971; The Sunlight Dialogues, 1972; October Light, 1976) in which he examined age-old questions like freedom vs. license through the prism of a gothic imagination that he said was set working by "the world of Walt Disney. I see those Disney...
Taylor, 51, has taken the rich vocabulary of dance, from the spine-straight balletic pas de deux to the earthbound dynamics of Martha Graham, and shaped it into a shifting and special language. He is the J.R.R. Tolkien of his form, and like the fabulist creates works too elaborate to please the avant-garde and too impudent for purists. In short, Taylor remains one of the most accessible of choreographers...
...Paris. That was "the city par excellence of art and the intellect," as De Chirico wrote, where "any man worthy of the name of artist must exact the recognition of his merit." Paris took young De Chirico, as it took young Chagall, and turned him from a naive provincial fabulist into a major painter. His "metaphysical" constructions, such as The Jewish Angel, 1916, certainly influenced Max Ernst. Just as certainly, they came out of the cubist sculpture De Chirico saw all over the Paris studios after 1912. De Chirico is often said to have used Renaissance space in his pictures...
Mark Helprin has the knack of creating exquisite tensions without disturbing the surface of his stories. And he understands the fabulist's task: "Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes...