Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Such tensions might have destroyed him. Instead, they lent rare power to his fiction. He learned to see two distinct ways of life. One belonged to the smug, narrow, easily shocked circle populated by his mother and her friends. The other possessed his imagination: total friendship, passionate, uninhibited and free, with a like spirit. Artistically, Forster did not want to choose, to become simply a novelist of manners or a poet of pleasures. The motto of his fourth novel, Howards End (1910), captured both the dilemma and the hope: "Only connect...
...America, fiction is always in trouble. The novel has been receiving extreme unction for 20 years, the short story is the waif of literature, perennially searching for a home. Yet this fall, scores of worthy novels have issued from distinguished publishers; stories still find a loyal readership. Random House Editorial Director Jason Epstein notes that James Michener's novel Chesapeake is selling twice as well as his last one. A first novel, Final Payments by Mary Gordon, has sold 40,000 copies. Says Epstein: The outlook for U.S. fiction has "never been better...
Richard Snyder, president of Simon & Schuster, agrees: "Anyone who decries the state of fiction is naive. It used to be that the maximum you could hope to sell in quality work was about 100,000 copies. That figure has doubled in recent years...
Herman Gollob, editor in chief of Atheneum, admits that "there is one kind of fiction that is disappearing - the non-friction novel that gives off no sparks, that is selfconscious, competent, tedious. But the rest of the list has unprecedented vitality and variety. If you can get Judith Krantz's Scruples and John Irving's The World According to Garp on the same bestseller list, you have a thriving democratic literature. " It is a literature that will always experience depressions as well as rallies. But for now, most publishers of novels and stories are bullish on fiction...
Happy endings are not the Kyle style. But time is a great provider. Today, the author informs us, the castle has been reconstructed as a youth hostel. Such truths are comforting; but it is fiction like Black Camelot that makes history live...