Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...theory is that Cervantes was the first magical realist. But then the British stole both the Spanish colonies and the Spanish novel. After that, a lot of Latin American literature merely aped European models. But life and the landscape in South America were always more vivid than conventional fiction could convey. Once writers began breaking the rules, their subjects came alive...
...further identification is necessary. Addicts of the Ray Bradbury Theater and votaries of The Illustrated Man can immediately identify the author's unique blend of science fiction, comic horror and pure corn oil. In this newest collection of stories, Bradbury, 67, shows why his previous works have sold more than 40 million copies in some 20 countries...
...readers of Donaldson's biography. Words made the man named Cheever, both in his fiction and in his elegant, often unsettling comments on himself and everything he loved and hated. Unfortunately, his biographer can offer only sparing, truncated and oblique evidence of his subject's distinctive gift. The snippets that are included simply underscore the absence of so many others. Here is Cheever, taking tranquilizers as a prescribed substitute for alcohol, complaining that the medication made him feel as "stagnant as the water under an old millwheel." On a visit to the University of Utah in 1977, the author grows...
Cheever would have groaned, or said something quite rude about such stale expressions. He was, after all, capable of describing himself as "intrinsically disheveled." Worse still, Donaldson seems only dimly aware of the discipline and artistry that went into Cheever's fiction. Two early stories, the biographer writes, "were deeply felt semiautobiographical tales populated by characters that the author (and hence the reader) clearly cared about." If "caring about" characters were truly a recipe for literary success, the world would be awash with masterpieces...
...both exalting and destroying everything and everyone around them, including each other. And behind their individual fates lies another, equally ambiguous story, which may be either the arrival of civilization in a barbarous land or the destruction of an Edenic world by pompous, ignorant invaders. Like the best fiction, Oscar and Lucinda does not require a choice between its alternative visions. It offers instead an enchanting contradiction, a mirror and a glass, a joyous reflection of how much and how little mere mortals are ever allowed...