Word: fiction
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...Nonami, 47, is the latest in a small group of tremendously popular contemporary female Japanese mystery writers to be translated into English. Their lurid fiction is anchored in ostensibly mundane domestic affairs - far cries from the hard-boiled yakuza netherworld of conventional Japanese crime fiction, where women mostly inhabit peripheral positions as prostitutes or femmes fatales. Like Natsuo Kirino, whose best-selling 1997 novel Out chronicles a band of disaffected middle-aged bento-box factory workers who moonlight as murderesses, Nonami places women at the center of her work. As the author of some 50 books, she is more prolific...
Although the story is fiction, Chicago is drawn from the two years that Al Aswany spent in the city during the mid-'80s while earning a dentistry degree from the University of Illinois. When he wasn't hitting the books, he would go out into the city - to a gay church, a black-pride organization, the Chicago Symphony - in search of American culture and ideas for a future novel. Nowadays, he could get by happily without his second income, but Al Aswany says he has no intention of giving up his dentistry practice, since filling cavities and performing root canals...
...Instead of tying the heroine to the railroad tracks (these days, the train would never arrive), he straps them into Rube Goldberg contraptions that slowly rip their fingernails off and tear their dignity to shreds. We live in a cruel world, but this is one area of criminality where fiction has long outstripped fact. According to the folks at Wikipedia - and those obsessive list-makers have to be trusted here - there have been 93 U.S. serial killers. Movies and novels topped that number ages ago, merrily tapping into, or creating, the audience's fascination with diseased minds and the atrocities...
...bereft over his father's suicide, and driven to punish those he believes responsible. Don't blame me, blame society. Sadly, this sympathy-for-the-devil tone permeates modern psychiatry: it says that every kink can be traced to some genetic mistake or childhood trauma. Can't anyone, in fiction or real life, just be a bad person...
What do you like to read for fun? -Martin Trafoier, Schlanders, ItalyMy goal this year is to read every book by John Steinbeck. I read most of them years ago as a student. I just finished a Mark Twain binge. It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer...