Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Anew book by Saul Bellow is an important event, and not only because he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. That award merely confirmed what thousands of readers had decided years earlier: Bellow's fiction offers a look at life that is not only essential but is unique among his contemporaries. Bellow has been the most rigorous naysayer to nihilism of his era. He has never tried to hide the gloomy truths about modern life or gloss over all the sound reasons (starting or ending with Auschwitz) for a thinking person to despair. His most memorable characters...
...strategy is only partly successful, since West prefers the exaggerated phrase. His father is "a very big man indeed." As for Wells' opponents, Henry James is charged with literary dictatorship and George Bernard Shaw with "Stalinism." And yet the author's praise is not entirely fulsome. Prophetic fiction owes its very existence to Wells. He was, as Joseph Conrad wrote, a "realist of the fantastic." In The World Set Free, he predicted the atom bomb; in The Island of Dr. Moreau, organ transplants; in The War of the Worlds, laser beams. Wells also produced a vast body...
...sorely in need of a provocative guide--a Kenneth Clark figure who would unashamedly saturate the text with the vagaries of personal taste. A Writer's Ireland is, rather, a dry, thorough skimming that leaves us without the real flavor of Ireland that so strongly pervades Trevor's fiction...
Then, speaking of age, she said hearing is the only faculty she has had diminish. She possesses good eyesight, imagination and memory. "The memory is a well," she said, "united" with the imagination in producing fiction. "Whatever you send down it comes back up deeper." From down the street there came the sound of little girls singing, a Ring-Around-the-Rosy sort of lyric, and if Welty did not hear it, it was nothing she had not heard before. Comes the day she needs the sound of child song for a page, she will remember it, sharply. -By Gregory...
...couple but in the hardy supporting cast. Senator Harry Victor barely appears, but Billy Dillon, his aide and campaign manager, and Frances Landau the most dedicated and humorless of his female followers, are dead-on figures of political fun, far fresher than the stock characters that people most political fiction...