Word: fictioners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...publishers' row, and quite a few rich strikes. To plain readers, prospecting for good, entertaining reading, the year brought a lot of satisfaction; six novels and six nonfiction books passed the 100,000 mark, creating the kind of bookstore traffic that carried along many more modest titles. In fiction, it was a year not of newcomers but of oldtimers. The big sellers were the big names, the reassuringly familiar quantities-Hemingway, Steinbeck, Du Maurier, Keyes, Costain, Ferber...
...youngsters have already zoomed confidently off into the vast ocean of space; they can buy space suits, space guns and rockets in almost any toyshop. In 50-odd science fiction magazines, space travel is a favorite theme. Eight comic strips and at least two TV programs are flying through space. "Scientific" space books are brisk sellers. But not all members of the space cult are storytellers, crackpots or kids. Some serious scientists believe that space flight will surely come, and perhaps soon, but they know that separating facts and fancy about space travel is almost as difficult as a trip...
Oversold Public. A large public, happily mixing fact & fiction, apparently believes that space travel is just around the corner. Two years ago New York's Hayden Planetarium whimsically offered "reservations" to the moon and planets. It got 25,000 requests, many of them deadly serious, from all over the world. Every military guided missile center has to chase "space volunteers" away from its guarded perimeter...
Since Dreiser and Frank Norris, the businessman in U.S. fiction has seldom been a hero; if he has not been a heel, he has at least been a target for satire. In Marquand's Point of No Return, the satire was gentle, in The Hucksters sharp. In many other "realistic" novels, the businessman was actually a caricature. On sale last week was a book that broke the tired old pattern. In Executive Suite (Houghton Mifflin: $3), Cameron Hawley has depicted businessmen who are neither heroes nor heels nor geniuses but, in the words of one of the characters...
...Simeons shows that the life of a leper is not always as hellish as Govind had supposed. Simeons is a London-born, Heidelberg-trained doctor who spent about 20 years in India. Now a consultant at Rome's International Hospital, he has written a novel that makes amateurish fiction but has the fascination of its grisly material. If the book is read simply as a knowing, colorful report on the lepers' way of life, its inadequacies as a novel can be comfortably ignored...