Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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White began his half-century affiliation with The New Yorker in 1925, contributing sketches, poems, and humorous essays like the "Go Climb a Tree Department." In 1929 he married Katharine Sergeant Angell, The New Yorker's first fiction editor...
DIED. Italo Calvino, 61, Italian author of fanciful imagination and technical virtuosity who used surreal fables and phantasmagorical science fiction to express thoroughly modern, realistic observations on human absurdity; of complications following a stroke; in Siena, Italy. A Resistance fighter during World War II, he drew on his partisan experiences in early, realistic works like The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), but turned more and more to fantasy in such books as The Baron in the Trees (1957), Invisible Cities (1973), The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1974) and If on a Winter Night a Traveler...
...American publisher, naturally, has admitted rejecting Amis on the basis of suspected misogyny. But if a few zealous feminists in positions of editorial power did try to squelch Stanley and the Women, they chiefly succeeded in shoring up an old truth: ideologues, of whatever persuasion, make lousy readers of fiction. They want useful truths, whereas good novels offer unbridled and possibly subversive speculations. Amis has excelled at rattling preconceptions ever since the appearance of his classically comic first novel, Lucky Jim, three decades ago. This time out he is near the top of his offensive, infuriating, intolerable and utterly hilarious...
...appear in English are actually new. Both Marcovaldo (1983) and Difficult Loves (1984) offered short stories that the Italian author wrote more than two decades ago, when his talents were entertainingly restricted to earthly realities. Mr. Palomar, on the other hand, belongs to the later vintage of Calvino's fiction. Like such works as Cosmicomics (1968) and Invisible Cities (1974), this novel uses the recognizable world primarily as an excuse for the launching of antic metaphysics...
...plague or epidemic, he lives intimately within. Death drifts through human blood or saliva. It commutes by bugbite or kiss or who knows what. It travels in mysterious ways, and everything, everyone, becomes suspect: a toilet seat, a child's cut, an act of love. Life slips into science fiction. People begin acting like characters in the first reel of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They peer intently at one another as if to detect the telltale change, the secret lesion, the sign that someone has crossed over, is not himself anymore, but one of them, alien and lethal...