Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WHEN A FRIEND told me about On High Steel last week he said it was a book about iron-workers and that it was good. I asked him what it was. He asked me what I meant. I said, come on--is it a novel, or non-fiction, or what? No, he said, waving an arm impatiently--it's just a book, you know, a book...
...Today the Chelsea is the permanent domain of Composer Virgil Thomson, the spot that Playwright Arthur Miller chooses to stay at when he is in town opening a new play, and the regular New York stopover for a host of luminaries from the world of art, music, film and fiction, who, along with its dozens of regular residents, prefer the funky, faded chic of the Chelsea to more contemporary quarters uptown. Perennial Chelsea guests include the entire Fonda clan, Director John Houseman and Actors Al Pacino and Timothy Bottoms. Boasts the hotel's managing director, Stanley Bard...
...FICTION...
WHILE ANAIS NIN concentrated on the art of fiction, Henry Miller tussled with his suspicion that her art was too often the artifice of fiction. Nin operated on an emotional plane where she tried to sketch the world through people's fantasies about it, instead of through physical reality. By delineating her characters in the hue of their own dreams and flights or imagination--with barely a hint at the link to actual experience--she hoped to distill the purest state of love, or fear, or aloneness from them. By concentrating on private mental worlds--which Nin called "cities...
LIKE A LOT in this book, this is a potentially intriguing thought that never comes to much. Nabokov uses his literary persona as license to play various sorts of games with words while avoiding the standard obligations of fiction writing, like characterization. A bit of solid, readable narrative would seem a relief to even the most liberal-thinking of readers after endless pages of more or less dazzling feats of verbal fancy on the order...