Word: fictional
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Katharine Sergeant White, 84, the sensitive and self-confident first fiction editor of The New Yorker. She brought a fine literary taste and a liberal pay rate for short stories to the publication, helping transform it from an unassuming satirical weekly into a first-run showcase for many of America's leading authors. Among them: John Cheever, John O'Hara, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov and Mary McCarthy. She married a New Yorker writer-though he turned out to be a master of nonfiction-named E.B. White...
...effect on those around her. Gestures like Hannah's shake the pillars of society; friends and loved ones are forced to reassess her life and theirs. Especially torn is Hannah's husband, who is treated as anything but the ogre who pops up in much current feminist fiction. A well-meaning man who has be come the "bill-paying machine" everyone expected him to be, Henry Jackson first tries to bully and then to cajole Hannah into the operating room. He argues sensibly that she is chasing after a romantic ideal, unattainable in life and certainly in death...
...Church of Scientology, founded 23 years ago by a science-fiction writer, does not believe in turning the other cheek. In a key church exercise called ''auditing," members are taught, for a handsome fee, to confront long-forgotten traumas-sometimes even from previous incarnations-and then to scourge these so-called "engrams" that have been troubling their subconscious...
Magical Memories. In nature, beauty is the beast. This is also true in much of Nabokov's fiction. The delectable nymphet Lolita has a cruel, popsicle heart. The exquisite sensibilities of her middle-aged lover Humbert Humbert are grotesquely twisted by lust. Charles Kinbote, whose magical memories feed Pale Fire, is hopelessly mad, as is Luzhin, the chessmaster in The Defense...
Nabokov crossed too many borders to have been a winner in the geopolitics of the Nobel Prize. Yet he gave a prize greater than any he might have received: his challenging, intricate fiction, which miraculously demonstrates that art is not a mirror held up to na ture, but rather a prism that refracts blinding reality into rainbows of wisdom and feeling...