Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FICTION...
...FICTION...
...twelve, his debt-hounded family yanked him from school and sent him to work in a ratty London warehouse where blacking paste was made. His ordeal lasted only a few months, then he returned to school. But, as Wilfrid Sheed notes in a preface to this brace of new fiction pieces, a sense of shock and abandonment stayed with Dickens the rest of his life. He could not even bring himself to mention the episode until 25 years later, when he wrote bitterly of "the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless...
...like the idea of funny fiction," says Wilfrid Sheed. "When I started writing, my first impulse was toward humor, but I soon learned that I wanted to use it for serious purposes." Sheed's first models were the "flat but musical" styles of such Americans as James Thurber and Sherwood Anderson; later, he added the English writers Cyril Connolly and E. M. Forster. Now he describes his fictional ideal as "Flaubert and James with the language of Wodehouse and Perelman...
...Monterey cigars always within reach, he scribbles in longhand with a No. 2 pencil. He half-consciously removes his clothes as he works. Precisely why he does that is a mystery but, whatever the reason, it enables him to produce a cascade of critical pieces in addition to his fiction. He is book editor of Commonweal, film critic for Esquire, and a freelance reviewer for at least half a dozen other publications. He undertakes this extra work partly for the money, but he also thoroughly enjoys it. "Criticism," he says, "is the last refuge of the light essayist." In Sheed...