Word: fictional
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With selections drawn from fairly regular intervals over these years, this book uncovers Beckett's development from a crisp but somewhat pedantic short-fiction writer ("Dante and the Lobster"), through his experimentation with the novel form (large sections of Molloy and The Unnamable), and finally into the most popularly successful phase of his art, drama (Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape...
...candidates in 1976 certainly do not compare with our very best, nor the campaign with our most electrifying contest. Still, this election is not as deplorable as the media would have us believe, and they have done the nation a great disservice by spreading this fiction...
Means of Liberation. At this point Mrs. Gray abruptly switches from the first-person "I" narrative form that has preserved whatever degree of credibility the story maintains. Stephanie in the third person, Stephanie as "she," makes fairly ludicrous fiction. She turns up, not drowned but hinting darkly at the presence of terminal cancer, tooting around the Southwest with a genial young homosexual whom she patronizes, mothers and seems to be weaning away from a fear of feminine flesh. Meanwhile she scribbles notes to her husband and communes with herself about nurturing and whether women can ever be happy free...
...experience into a story that will believably carry its own truth. ("If one day they find their way into a book," Graham Greene wrote about the details of a novelist's life, "it should be without our connivance.") Successful biography, and autobiography, are less demanding than fiction. They mainly require qualities that Francine Gray clearly possesses: eloquence, extraordinary intellect and a fascinating life to exploit...
Beneath the extraordinary range of Bellow's fiction, unifying his stretch from New World quest to Old World criticisms, from Rousseau to reason, lie several constant questions. How can a man lead a good life? What use is the new age's vaunted individuality if it turns society into a jungle and leaves human beings cut off from each other and the past? When he is advised to be himself, young Augie March replies: "I have always tried to become what I am. But what if what I am by nature isn't good enough?" Mr. Sammler...