Word: fictioners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...through the summer, fiction sales have been in a slump. Most of the books at the top of the bestseller lists (The Cardinal, The Wall, Star Money, Jubilee Trail) have perched there for months, not because they are great novels but because the competition has not been good enough to dislodge them. The term bestseller itself became almost a misnomer. "Bestseller sales," complains the Retail Bookseller, "are down to depression levels." What is needed, says Bookseller, is "vitamin pills...
...ratings found themselves unable to define such low-down underworld terms as gopher (safeblower), third rail (incorruptible official), derrick (shoplifter) and kite (a letter sneaked past the warden). Crooks don't talk that way in Pasadena, they complained. The chief of police agreed, ordered all "detective fiction crime terms" stricken from the exam. Said one cop who got a higher score than his mates: "I'd read a short story in the Saturday Evening Post the night before, so I knew most of the answers...
Arson & Anguish. In the Collected Stones, Faulkner's blazing skill and lazy improvisations, his rich humor and corny folksiness, his deep sense of tragedy and tasteless gothic excesses are all brought together. About half a dozen stories are as good bits of fiction as have ever been written in the U.S.: Barn Burning, a poignant sketch of a boy's anguished love for his arsonist-father; A Rose for Emily, that hair-raising classic of a lady's decline to necrophilia; Wash, a magnificent portrait of a poor white who, after years of loyalty, rebels against...
Once upon a carefree time, escapists could pick up a historical novel confident of finding a simple mixture of sword play and midnight love. Nowadays, as part of the now fashionable pedantry that corrodes everything from highbrow poetry to lowbrow science fiction, the historical novel is often as minutely researched as a Ph.D. thesis. Merchant of the Ruby, a fearsomely thorough drenching in the 15th Century Wars of the Roses, is a prime example. Readers of the Merchant need a refresher course in history, an elaborate diagram of royal genealogy, and a passionate interest in the problem of which English...
Author Stinetorf makes only one pass at romance, quickly drops it in obvious discomfort. Her story might have been better as nonfiction, but its air of authenticity (Louise Stinetorf was an educational missionary in Palestine, spent her vacations in Africa) and its very unawareness of the niceties of fiction keep it from sounding like a bad novel. It is just primitive enough to be fresh...