Word: fiction
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...issue, however, was not simply whether Fact had been full of fiction. Senator Goldwater was then a particularly public figure, and the Supreme Court has made it extremely difficult for such persons to win a libel suit. To avoid stifling the free-speech right to criticize government leaders, the court since 1964 has required proof that the alleged libeler had "malice" or "reckless disregard" for the truth. Just two weeks ago, the test became stiffer still. Beyond "reckless disregard," the court added the necessity of proving that the libeler "entertained serious doubt" about the truth of his accusation...
...Among the other Pulitzer winners: William Styron, the fiction prize for The Confessions of Nat Turner; George F. Kennan, the biography award for Memoirs: 1925-1950; Will and Ariel Durant, the general nonfiction laurels for the tenth and final volume of The Story of Civilization...
...Fiction as Artifice. There are other such feints in the novel, including a jarring and inexplicable projection of Franz into a diseased old age, and a lunatic landlord who constantly threatens to break up the game but never does. But in the end, it is the author's stylized and intentionally visible hand that collects all bets. Martha succumbs meekly to pneumonia. Franz, relieved of his responsibilities as stud and killer, leaps into madness. Dreyer continues good-naturedly to misread all signs...
Here, as in Nabokov's more sophisticated novels, an important theme is the nature of fiction itself. By putting his comic trio through a series of abstract stances-a modification of the futurist and expressionist influences that swept the arts in the '20s-he never allows the reader to forget that fiction is essentially artifice. In King, Queen, Knave, the artifice may be a little too obvious, but intelligence and wit keep it working smoothly to the end. Nabokov himself could well have been thinking of this "bright brute" when he described a certain variety of butterfly...
...recalcitrant reviewer paused a moment in Brattle Square. He has for some time been convinced that there is no shortest path between these two points, that Brattle Square, and perhaps most of the corner we occupy in south-west Cambridge, are located smack in the heart of what science-fiction writers used lovingly to term a "time warp." Four years of this town, of predictable variety and commonplace brilliance, can do that to a fellow. Places, and the people who choose to hold them, can distort perception; can modify and magnify, enrich and cheapen, help and hurt. Cambridge does things...