Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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These modern-day Sister Carries are the stars of a new genre of soap-opera fiction that has been leapfrogging from the pages of one metropolitan daily to another. Featuring young singles and written with a local background that often includes real people in cameo roles. the serials are pure whipped cream in a paper's usual menu of views and service features. "One of the reasons we started Probity," explains Des Moines Tribune Managing Editor Drake Mabry, "was to broaden the appeal of the paper to a part of the audience we're not reaching...
...Boston Globe tried a soap called Tangled Lives. "There weren't enough good yarns in the paper," says Assistant Executive Editor Richard Phelps. "It didn't bother me to run fiction with fact. People might get confused if you just threw the fiction in pellmell, but they won't if it's properly labeled and you don't try to pass it off as truth." But the soap bored its few readers. How to abandon the series? Author Tom Fitzgerald simply killed off all his characters by having them eat infected clams...
...Controversy, if not quality, bids fair to make The Public Burning a major publishing event. An excerpt from the novel that ran last fall in American Review alerted readers to its incendiary subject: the June 19, 1953, execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. In Coover's fiction, the convicted atomic bomb spies are transferred from the death house at Sing Sing to a public stage in Times Square for their execution. Word began circulating that several publishers had considered the manuscript and decided not to risk legal repercussions. The question naturally arose: What in this obstreperous age could...
...best and worst in Coover's method coexist with greatest strain. His portrait of an ambitious, insecure and privately obsessed public man is remarkably comprehensive and even moving. If only the character were not named Nixon, all would be well. But Coover allows no distinction between his fiction and the living man; much of the humor depends on a knowledge of the real Nixon's career. As the fictional Nixon's humiliations increase (he is made to appear seminude in front of the throngs at the execution site), what could have been an act of imagination sours...
...FICTION 1-The Thorn Birds, McCullough (1 last week) 2-The Crash of '79, Erdman (2) 3-Falconer, Cheever (4) 4-Trinity, Uris (5) 5-Oliver's Story, Segal (6) 6-Condominium, MacDonald (3) 7-The Chancellor Manuscript, Ludlum (7) 8-Illusions, Bach (8) 9-Full Disclosure, Safire (10) 10-Paris One, Brady