Word: fictioneering
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Just once in a while there arrives a motion picture that forces one to admit that Twentieth-Century society has developed a magnificent artistic medium, worthy of comparison to Elizabethan drama or Russian fiction of the last century. Perhaps symbolically for our age, its finest examples are not attributable to one man, author, script-writer, producer, director, or the actors. If any of these fail, the movie cannot be first-rate, and that is very likely the most important reason why the percentage of excellent films is so small. "Great Expectations" is a great picture. No one factor made...
...Catholic, the "terrible obscurantism" is what made some conservative U.S. Catholics pro-Fascist before the war, because they were ready to believe that Mussolini et al. would stamp out Communism. They were also antiliberal, anti-Negro, and anti-Semitic for a number of reasons, including Irish racial snobbism. As fiction, Moon Gaffney is hardly rnore than earnest and competent, but it is most impressive as a blast against bias, false Irish pride and the local little Father Coughlins...
Only a sympathetic and delicate work of fiction could do complete justice to the quirky beliefs of backwoods Americans in western Missouri and Arkansas. In this book, the quirks are set down as fact, exhaustively and entertainingly, by an Ozark scholar who has lived in the mountains for 30 years and kept a card file that eventually filled a trunk. He writes without condescension and also without the solemn intensity of the sociologist. Some of the Ozark signs and sayings he found...
...Narcissus, shows how heady a wine the English language may be for a foreign writer of parts who has thoroughly acquired it. Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov's second novel in English (he has written seven in Russian), is one of the most intelligent nightmares of dictatorship in modern fiction. It is also a lip-smacking over the flavors of English prose to rouse the tired syntax in 10,000 editorials. Nabokov's style glimmers with reflections of many great styles (Gogol's, Flaubert's, Joyce's) and yet is distinctly his own: rapid, brilliantly metaphorical...
...print. When I detected a Position Wanted Female ad worded 'Young girl, inexperienced, will do anything,' I would call up that young girl and tell her that she might be misunderstood." For the next ten years Leonard free-lanced, writing books (Enjoyment of Science, etc.), articles & fiction for slick paper magazines...