Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...have arrived safely on firm, green ground. The current issue combines the magazine's previous virtues with a new one, short stories that are worth the type they use. Now the consistently fine poetry, drawings, and makeup all yield the spotlight to the place where it belongs-on the fiction...
...Strength Is a Tower," by Robert Bly, and "Jazz Man," by James McGovern, are perhaps less distinguished examples of fiction writing than the lead story, but both are competent, meaty jobs. Bly's work, dealing with a man who can't stand his wife, gives a faintly amusing twist to a serious theme. The imagery is precise, bold, and unpretentious, as "Making himself speak to her was like biting into something spoiled and sour." "Jazz Man" is old stuff (a washed-up musician tries to bide the fact from himself), but that doesn't matter, for the telling is fresh...
...longer made fashionable copy but remained like a departing storm cloud, high above the year's fiction. One of the better pieces of writing about it was Allen R. Matthews' The Assault, a terse account of hitting the beach at Iwo Jima. Worth reading were John Home Burns's The Gallery, a novel of a G.I.'s experiences in Naples, Charles Christian Wertenbaker's story of the French Forces of the Interior (Write Sorrow on the Earth), Godfrey Blunden's novel of Moscow and Muscovites in their grim winters of war and political despair...
...always, commercial fiction writers hammered out their fables according to formula, exploiting the daydreams of the young ("This girl might have been YOU") and the complacencies of the self-deceived. Sexual pandering in the form of the novel had its usual quota of professional and amateur practitioners. As always, however, a few hundred young men & women, fascinated by the charms of art and the oddities of real experience, tried to write honestly and well...
...FICTION...