Word: fiction
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...literary celebrity, Hollywood, alcoholism, two failed marriages and at least one critical scalping, only to retain his stature as one of the most original American writers on either side of the Mississippi. This fall his seventh novel, Keep the Change, was published, ending a four-year hiatus from long fiction. The New York Times proclaimed it the "best book he has written to date." Almost as sweet is the news that Keep the Change is already the best- selling book of his career. No wonder that McGuane's Raw Deal Ranch has been rechristened Gladstone...
McGuane is alert to revealing parallels between the art of cutting cattle and the craft of writing novels. "You cannot work cattle by force," he explains. "A cutting horse separates a cow from the herd through a kind of choreographic countermovement. It's very much like fiction: you can't sit down and say, 'Goddammit, I'm going to blast out these sentences and send them to the publisher' -- this kind of John Wayneism of literature. You just can't." He finds the notion of a so-called Rocky Mountain school of literature equally specious. Still, he admits that "there...
...bootlegging facts in the diplomatic pouch of fiction, Sinyavsky demonstrates the range of his virtuosity and literary cunning by echoing some Russian masters: Gogol of the satiric Dead Souls, Dostoyevsky of the subversive Notes from Underground, Turgenev of the pastoral Fathers and Sons, Nabokov of the evocative Speak, Memory. It is a special tradition, one in which publish or perish could have just as easily meant publish and perish...
...series Amerika), is truly heartbreaking. She can convey both the despair lurking behind a brave comment to her husband and a pathetic joy at ever smaller victories. "You guys, look!" she gasps on first ^ seeing their decrepit bathroom in the welfare hotel. "Privacy!" In the controversy over fact vs. fiction, real artistry can settle a lot of debates...
...jeremiad, the "puppet-masters" of the American literary scene imported a new pantheon of foreign literary gods -- Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The "headlong rush" to get rid of realism, Wolfe complains, resulted in statements like that of experimental novelist John Hawkes, "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme...