Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...vast collection of models and toys. A U-boat, suspended beneath the painted sea on painted sticks, is also done from a toy. As a document of catastrophe, the scene is far from believable, but its curious power as an image comes partly from the sheer blatancy of its fiction. The fact that the plane, the liner and the sub are sso toylike carries one back to the I mock battles of the nursery, to the child's delight in constructing harmless miniature wrecks that dis charge the aggressions of child? hood. "As flies to wanton boys...
...piece of short fiction involving a crime usually leaves the reader with a solution of sorts to hold in his hand. Trillin's narratives often leave no more than a handful of smoke. In an odd way this takes the curse off what is really voyeurism. For a dozen pages or more, the reader sees so closely that he wants to excuse himself, to clear his throat so the figures in the drama will know he is there. Then the curtain closes abruptly, and he is left to brood about why psychological insulation burned through at just such...
...gentle-spirited novelist and short-story writer, best known for her first collection of stories, The Friendly Persuasion, about a Quaker family on the Indiana frontier during the Civil War; in Napa, Calif. Born into a Quaker family (Richard Nixon is her distant cousin), West set much of her fiction in her native Indiana, although she lived most of her life in California. "I am by all I know a Californian," she once said, "and by all I imagine a Hoosier...
...February's "The Easy Chair," Lapham dropped the bomb. Harper's would become "a synopticon of fact and fiction," summarizing ideas and trends, reprinting short articles from other sources, providing a list of interesting facts from around the world and establishing a Forum on ideas of national interest. The monthly that had won the 1983 National Magazine Award for General Excellence was going to cut back on its essays and polemics, admit that jounalism was at its nadir, and begin dealing in second-hand short forms and juxtapositions of images...
...short remarks by Kurt Vonnegut on Nuclear War and John Gardner's posthumous advice to young fiction writers remained in my thoughts after the ephemeral had been forgotten. A few facts from the "Index," which was designed to "reflect the shifting currents of fact below the surface of the news," also stayed with me; the number of students who scored "double 800's" on the SAT's in 1982-83 (only 4), the number of wars in 1983 (41), and the percentage of Americans who think the afterlife will be boring (5 percent...