Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first three essays are an interesting view of the formation of ideas and themes that reappear in all of Updike's fiction. Many critics consider his novels, short stories and poetry largely autobiographical, and the way in which he explains the process of composing suggests that perhaps all writing stems from childhood fascinations of the author. Updike presents the interplay between experience and writing almost as an empirical proof, giving example after example and following each...
...feel comfortable joining it himself. The recurring rashes on his skin kept him apart, drove his attention inward: "You are forced to the mirror, again and again; psoriasis compels narcissism, if we can suppose a Narcissus who did not like what he saw." One of the hallmarks of his fiction became elaborate celebrations of the status quo. Updike thinks he knows why: "An overvaluation of the normal went with my ailment, a certain idealization of everyone who was not, as I felt myself to be, a monster...
...this planet or, more seriously, eternity. Updike does not want to conclude that his -- or anyone's -- existence means nothing in the long run. His belief in God, his Sunday church-going, his hope for some form of a hereafter are all discussed and underline how unconventional his fiction has been by contemporary standards...
...THEFT by Saul Bellow (Penguin; $6.95). The Nobel laureate offers an original novella in paperback, a vivid new fiction in which the familiar Bellow hero has become a heroine...
...insult to Islam. For good measure, Iranians have offered a bounty of as much as $5.2 million to Rushdie's executioner. The world is stunned by the notion that the Iranian leader would issue a death threat against a British subject who has merely written a work of phantasmagoric fiction that, to be sure, occasionally deals with Islam in a fanciful and irreverent...