Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...final installment of his fiction trilogy, Professor of Law Derrick Bell devises a scheme to blow up the Harvard Coop when it won't invite him to hold a book-signing/wine and brie party there. Bell is awarded a $10 million contract by Paramount Pictures to turn the episode into a screenplay...
EIGHT years ago I had just turned 13. I was in the seventh grade, and I skipped band every day to sit around in free period reading science fiction. I remember reading a lot of Harlan Ellison. It was the age when "I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream" can seem a profound statement of the human condition...
...this diverse plenty a consistently high quality of thought and prose, and one has the makings of a Man of Letters -- a quaint designation in this era of celebrity scribes, but valid nevertheless. Wilson's formal structure and traditional style indicate an impatience with the sort of contemporary fiction that makes its own creation a central concern. What matters to him is the contradictions of human nature and the religious impulses that seek to understand the desires of the flesh and the spirit...
These are the central players in what evolves from a surface entertainment into a deceptively rich and complex novel about coming of age (if not about the age itself). Julian's story brims with figures and rituals familiar to British fiction: barmy relatives, eccentric aristocrats, a public school -- the "English Gulag" -- where the headmaster enjoys hitting boys with sticks. As a teenager, Julian spends a summer in Brittany, where French is taught by Mme. de Normandin and sex by her daughter Barbara. Later, while trying to avoid work in the army, he learns another of life's essential lessons...
Take a break, flake. Some of us grew up reading comic books, sports stories, science fiction or other literature that might not please Hirsch's dignified tastes. We read about what we liked, and that's how we learned to read. If children test poorly on a reading comprehension passage about, say, the Mongolian tree iguana, and well on one about a space taxi, it's because they are more interested in space than in life sciences, not necessarily because have read extensively on the subject. Literacy provides the freedom to discover and decide our own interests, which Hirsch constrains...